The installation, ‘Tape #1: Tools for Gauging Distances’, takes place at 46-48 Faneromenis Street. According to the organisers, it explores the distances separating academia from state institutions, religion from antiquities and contemporary art from money, which they describe as not merely geometric but matters of power, interpretation and ownership.

The project is supported by the Department of Contemporary Culture of the Deputy Ministry of Culture.

Wednesday 11 and Thursday 12 November

The opening and central event is an electroacoustic lament, ‘post-truth is another water game I play against my mouth’, at 8.30pm on both nights. Composed and constructed by Stella N. Christou, it features Yannatou once again in the role of the ‘Mouth’. According to the organisers, the piece measures the distances between truth and play, and between the body that speaks and the speech that escapes, proposing mourning as an active cognitive act.

Androula Kafa and Christou take the roles of ‘Actant Worker – Past’ and ‘Actant Worker – Future’. They are joined by the Arcades Bildakt ensemble: Andria Nicodemou on vibraphone and percussion, Tasos Stamou on bouzouki, improvised sound sources and electronics, Jannis Anastasakis on musical saw and analogue electronics, Symis Soukiouroglou on clarinet, Yeti, and Demetris Shammas on lighting.

Video is by Evi Roumani and Eleni Bartzila, and sound by Christos Christodoulou. The visual installation is by Soukiouroglou, Christou, Yeti, KinΣ and Field-Effect Transistors. Visual design is by Stelios Papageorgiou of Common Grounds studio, and design by George Tsaggaris.

Friday 13 November

From 5pm to 2am, ‘Rec’ is a gathering and interactive artists’ tour with Kala Kathoumena.

Saturday 14 November

Stamou leads a workshop, ‘The Art of Circuit Bending’, from 10.30am to 7pm. It covers the history and prehistory of DIY electronic sound, along with its basic principles, techniques and tools, and participants will build electronic musical instruments from recycled materials. No prior knowledge is needed.

Sunday 15 November

At 5pm, the Athens-based Laboratory for the Urban Commons (LUC) presents ‘Revisiting Aboulomania’. Members of the collective will revisit material from Christou’s work ‘Aboulomania’, alongside practices the collective developed online during the pandemic, and the public is invited to take part.

Aboulomania, from the Greek for “without will”, describes paralysis in the face of choice. The interactive digital work was created by Field-Effect Transistors in 2021-22, during the pandemic, as part of the international programme ‘The Whole Life, Archives and Imaginaries’ at HKW in Berlin. It is installed in the building’s basement as a digital environment in which a decision is never made.

The artists

Christou studied music at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and fine art at the Athens School of Fine Arts. She is a founding member of Space of Tapes, an artist-run research platform based between Nicosia, Athens and Berlin.

Yannatou was born in Athens and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She has released around 30 albums and has worked with the group Primavera en Salonico since 1994.

Stamou builds and plays DIY electronic instruments and has led workshops in London, Athens, Dortmund and elsewhere.

LUC’s members are Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Panayotis Lianos, Stavros Stavrides and Pegy Zali.

Tickets and bookings

Tickets for the lament on 11 and 12 November cost 12 euros, or 5 euros reduced. Reservations for the performance and the circuit bending workshop can be made on Instagram at @spaceoftapes or online, and information is available on 96 510 696. Performance bookings can also be made by phone.

The show runs from 17 to 22 November at The Tagli, a gallery at 67 Great Titchfield Street.

According to the gallery, the exhibition treats ‘the point’ as both a mark and a moment: something carved, excavated, recorded, created or reached. It looks at how rarity arises in nature, through chance, evolution and geological events, and how it is manufactured in culture through value, scarcity and desire. Trading cards, with their detailed systems of classification, are one reference point, the gallery says, and that logic carries into ceramic works about how something new comes into being: its making, materials, colour and form.

The gallery describes extinction as perhaps the ultimate rare event, since an animal can become extinct only once and a volcano can stop being active only once. The circle recurs throughout the work as a metaphor for the point, marking either a beginning or an end.

The first chapter of the metal works focuses on cultural firsts that can never be repeated: the Moon landing, the first full-length animated film and the first trading cards. The neon works borrow the bright visual language of animation to mask something darker: the possibility of disappearance and the end of things.

Stylianou, who was born in Nicosia in 1990, is a painter and sculptor. He studied at the Architectural Association in London and holds master’s degrees from the Royal College of Art in London and IE Business School in Madrid.

His work draws on biographical narratives, reimagined cultural archetypes, vivid colour and techniques informed by his background in architecture, according to the gallery. He has held solo exhibitions in Cyprus, the US, the UK, Canada and Hong Kong, and has taken part in group exhibitions in several countries, including Italy and Germany.

The opening night is on Tuesday, 17 November, from 6pm to 9pm, by RSVP only, with press previews earlier that day from 11am to 4pm by appointment. The gallery is open from 11am to 7pm Tuesday to Saturday, and from 11am to 4pm on Sunday.

For an artist who came to sculpture not through an academy or formal artistic training but through years of patient observation, experiment and solitary work, the response offers the affirmation of a practice that has evolved quietly over more than four decades.

Christodoulou, born in January 1937 in Achna, a village in the Famagusta district now under Turkish occupation, began his professional life far from the sculptor’s studio. He trained as a teacher, distinguished himself as a sprinter and went on to study mathematics, ancient history and constitutional law through the University of London’s external degree program.

He was subsequently appointed to Nicosia’s First Technical School in 1967, where he remained for three decades before retiring in 1997. Sculpting, however, had already claimed him by then.

He began working with the medium in 1983, initially collecting tree roots, stones and other objects whose irregularities seemed to suggest possibilities beyond their ordinary forms. The decisive encounter came with a piece of red jasper, oval in shape. As he smoothed its surface, following rather than resisting its natural contours, a face gradually appeared.

It was an unassuming beginning, but it contained the principle that would guide much of his subsequent work: the artist does not always impose a form upon a material; sometimes he discovers the form already waiting within it.

Christodoulou taught himself the technical demands of sculpture through repeated trials and sustained patience. He worked in marble, Tochni stone, limestone from Lympia, granite, river stone, cypress and walnut wood, as well as terracotta. Each material presented its own resistance and possibilities. His achievement has been to learn these differences through practice, allowing the particular character of a stone or piece of wood to determine the sculpture’s eventual expression.

The human figure remains his central subject. Some of his sculptures recall the spare, monumental qualities of ancient Cypriot art, yet they are not exercises in archaeological imitation. Instead, the figures emerge with a modern simplicity, their rounded, sensual contours often approaching abstraction. The body is neither merely represented nor separated from its material: it appears to belong to the stone, as though the two had arrived at their final shape together.

There is also a quiet dialogue with Cyprus’s artistic heritage, including a work inspired by the celebrated imagery of a mother and child associated with the painter Adamantios Diamantis. Such references suggest not nostalgia but an ongoing conversation between inherited forms and an individual artistic temperament.

Christodoulou’s path to recognition has been measured rather than hurried. His first exhibition took place in 1991 at the Famagusta Gate Workshop. Subsequent exhibitions followed at the University of Cyprus in 2006, the Ministry of Culture’s exhibition space in 2011, Chelsea Town Hall in London in 2016, and Gloria Gallery in Nicosia in 2019.

His personal biography, too, contains an unexpected crossing of cultures. In 1959, during a brief visit to Romania, he met Christina Todea, then a student of English and French literature at the University of Bucharest. Their courtship unfolded over successive summer visits, each brief encounter sustaining a relationship across borders and political divides. They married in 1962, after obtaining the necessary official approvals, and Christina arrived in Cyprus the following year.

There is something quietly resonant in this story of distance, patience and discovery, qualities that seem to find an echo in Christodoulou’s sculpture. His work asks for an unhurried gaze and a willingness to look beyond the surface, to recognise the possibilities concealed within an unremarkable piece of stone or wood. Just as his own artistic journey began with the gradual emergence of a face from a piece of red jasper, his sculptures invite the viewer to discover what is already there, waiting to be revealed. Across the years, his practice has remained faithful to this essential encounter between material and imagination, in which the artist’s task is as much one of listening as of shaping.

The exhibition in Nicosia suggests that his work has found its public. For an artist whose practice began with a face emerging from a piece of jasper, the encounter between sculptor, material and viewer remains the essential event. The stone is still speaking; people have come to listen.

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The anniversary sale will also include works by Mr. Brainwash, Benjamin Spark, Richard Orlinski and Sonke, alongside Greek artists Costas Tsoclis, Giorgos Stathopoulos, Vasilis Sperantzas, Angelos, Sofia Kalogeropoulou, Kostis Georgiou, Dimitris Geros, Edouardos Sacayan, Apostolos Chantzaras, Paschalis Angelidis, Vasilis Antonakos and Kostas Andreou.

Founder Vangelis Kapopoulos said the auction house had established itself in Cyprus in 2006 and that reaching its 20th year was a very significant milestone.

“Each of our auctions raises the bar ever higher,” he said, adding that the house brought leading international art to Cyprus alongside major Greek artists with whom it kept in personal contact.

Kapopoulos said the house also took an active part in the international art market, pointing to its participation in the Moderne Art Fair at the Place de la Concorde in Paris on October 22.

The works can be viewed at the hotel on October 12 from 5pm to 8pm, on October 13 from 10am to 9pm and on October 14 from 10am to 7pm. The auction begins at 7pm on October 14.

The Ajax Hotel can be reached on 25590000. For more information, call +30 2108974441, +30 2103637652 or +30 6988716630 in Greece, or +357 99407012 in Cyprus, or visit kapopoulosfinearts.com.

‘Routine Maintenance: A Tale’ is a sculptural sound environment by Lower Levant Company, the duo of Emiddio Vasquez and Peter Eramian, and Olga Micińska. Its title comes from a statement by the Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) authorities on work at Akrotiri Salt Lake, where locals are protesting against plans for as many as 68 new communications antennae, which they call “antennae of death”. According to the statement, any work under way is “associated with routine maintenance” and not with plans to install new listening antennae.

The exhibition brings together two existing works. ‘Crossover Frequency Spectrum’ (2024), made by Lower Levant Company with Gaetano di Gregorio, was shown at the Cyprus Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. ‘Bad Luck to Every Magistrate, and Bad luck to Every Gamekeeper’ (2026), by Lower Levant Company and Micińska, was presented at the Sonic Acts Biennial in Amsterdam.

The installation combines whistles and crackles captured from the ionosphere near RAF antennae, an imaginary radio transmission from a historic number station and recordings of bat calls. In ‘Crossover Frequency Spectrum’, repurposed audiophile speaker horns shaped like plants, which the organisers say resemble a surveillance system, filter the sound by frequency, inviting listeners to tune in to frequencies that are often present, and even extremely loud, but not easily heard. Clay replicas of the horns, handmade by ceramicist and architect di Gregorio, rise from a bed of copper slag.

‘Bad Luck to Every Magistrate, and Bad luck to Every Gamekeeper’ turns models of artificial bat houses into sound sculptures, imagining bat colonies reclaiming the land around the British bases. It uses recordings made over seven years: a lone common pipistrelle flying near RAF Akrotiri in Asomatos, a colony living in La Cabaña, the Spanish-built fortress in Havana, and Mexican free-tailed bats at the Bracken Cave Preserve in Texas. According to the organisers, the Texas site is the world’s largest concentration of mammals, where 20 million bats roost every year before crossing the Mexican border with their young.

The exhibition reworks both pieces with new sculptural additions and a forthcoming record release. According to the organisers, it raises questions about Cyprus’s history of transmission and its role as an ‘antenna island’ in the region, which they say implicates it in what they describe as the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the US-Israel war with Iran. It also addresses the environmental impact of the British bases in Cyprus, questioning ideas such as ‘ecologies of care’ in the face of growing militarism, continuing colonial presence and what the organisers call irreversible ecological catastrophe.

The exhibition runs until November 6. The opening is at 7pm on October 16, and it is open Wednesday to Friday from 6pm to 8pm, or by appointment.

You may encounter it in a shop window. In the window of an artist’s studio. On a wall, or somewhere you have passed by countless times without any particular reason to stop. For a few weeks, a walk through Nicosia’s old walled city acquires another reason to slow down. Moving images appear in places that were never designed as exhibition spaces, while video art finds its way between buildings, shop windows, cafés, people and the everyday movement of the city.

This is how PSI Foundation has chosen to make its first presentation in Nicosia. Rather than simply bringing an exhibition from Limassol to the capital, it is experimenting with a different way of bringing art and audiences together. The new project, Objects in the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear, curated by Evagoria Dapola, leaves behind the safety of an enclosed gallery and spreads across different locations in the old city.

The exhibition does not necessarily wait for visitors to walk through its doors. Instead, it encounters them in unexpected and, at times, surprising places. The city itself thus becomes part of the exhibition, as the works become integrated into its everyday rhythm and appear in spaces that, until now, served entirely different purposes.

There is something intriguing about the idea of an artwork appearing where you least expect it. In a museum or gallery, you already know why you are there. You have decided to look. You have set aside time. On the street, however, encountering art can be entirely unplanned. You may be in a hurry, heading for coffee, returning from work, or simply passing by. And somewhere in between all of this, an image may make you stop.

This element of chance appears to lie at the heart of the project. Artists’ studios, architectural offices and former workshops, as well as shop windows, windows, walls and cafés, temporarily acquire a second life. The art presented in Objects in the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear is not isolated from the city; instead, it enters its rhythm and becomes part of it.

After all, even the title of the exhibition comes from something entirely familiar: the warning found on car mirrors, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” A phrase we usually read without giving it much thought takes on a different dimension in this context.

How close, after all, is what we see? How does an image change when the point from which we look at it changes? And what happens when something familiar suddenly appears within a different context?

Of course, a passer-by does not need to know the theory behind these questions to become part of the experience. Perhaps all it takes is to look a little longer.

A Journey That Began in Limassol

The arrival in Nicosia is not an isolated move for PSI Foundation. Rather, it is an extension of a journey that began two years ago in Limassol.

PSI was founded there in 2024 as a non-profit organisation and established its permanent home in a restored 1960s carob warehouse. A building with a history of its own became a space for contemporary creativity and gradually began hosting exhibitions, artists, music, dance and a range of cultural activities.

The journey began with Casts of an Island, curated by Nikos Pattichis. It was followed by Τέκτων, a research project focusing on modernist architecture and Cyprus during the early years of independence, while the foundation’s programme simultaneously expanded to embrace different forms of contemporary creativity and international collaborations.

In 2026, one of the most important names in the history of video art, Bill Viola, became part of this journey. And this is precisely where the connection with Nicosia lies.

Two cities, two different ways of looking at the same art.

In Limassol, Bill Viola. Unspoken creates an environment in which the viewer is invited to pause, the noise from outside recedes, time slows down, and the moving image demands attention.

In Nicosia, almost the opposite happens. The image moves out into the street and becomes part of it. There is no silence of a controlled exhibition space. Instead, there are cars, voices, passers-by, shops, and people coming and going. The screen now finds itself face to face with real life and must, for a moment, compete for the attention of someone who may not have intended to encounter art at all.

This makes the relationship between the two exhibitions perhaps even more intriguing. In one city, the viewer moves towards the image; in the other, the image enters the viewer’s path.

Between the two stands PSI Foundation, with Limassol remaining its base and Nicosia becoming, for the first time, a new field of activity.

It is not so much a matter of moving from one city to another, but rather of testing the same conversation in a different environment and with a different audience.

Objects in the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear

The exhibition brings together 14 works by 9 artists: Maria Anastasiou, Nadim Choufi, Danae Io, Stelios Kallinikou, Kakia Katselli, Aristotelis Nikolaos Mochloulis, Alexandros Pissourios, Janis Rafa and Konstantinos Taliotis.

For more information: psi.art

Opening: Thursday, September 17, 2026, 19:00

Exhibition runs: September 17–October 15, 2026

Where: IN TOTO Gallery Space, 8A Kanari Street, Agioi Omologites, 1080 Nicosia

Working hours: Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 17:00–19:30; Saturday, 10:00–13:00

Also open during Laou Laou on Sunday, September 20, 10:00–13:00 and 15:30–19:30.

About the exhibition

The show is built around a simple idea: that looking is never really one-directional. We tend to think of observation as something one person does to another, an artist looking, a sitter being looked at, but Stevanović’s work argues the opposite happens the longer a portrait takes to make. Painting from life stretches out over hours and sittings, and somewhere in that duration, the line between who’s observing and who’s being observed starts to blur. Attention runs both ways.

For Stevanović, a sitter is less a finished subject than a starting point. Each portrait becomes a negotiation, between structure and instinct, closeness and distance, discipline and feeling, worked out over the time artist and sitter spend together. That time is what lets a straightforward likeness give way to something harder to pin down, a way of seeing built out of colour, weight, rhythm and light rather than resemblance alone.

Nothing in the show is quick. The works are built up slowly, through repetition and revision, so what they hold onto isn’t a single moment but the whole span of an encounter. The people in them stay recognisable, but they’ve been reshaped by the painter’s sustained attention until they’re inseparable from the process that made them.

The title works on two levels at once. Each piece is the product of close observation, but the exhibition as a whole is also a quiet look at Stevanović’s own life since settling in Cyprus, the friends, family and daily routines that have come to define it. Taken together, the seven works read less as a set of individual portraits than as a portrait of closeness itself, of the people and spaces that have shaped a life on the island.

A self-portrait closes the loop. The person doing the observing steps into the frame, and looking turns back on itself: what starts as attention paid to others ends up, inevitably, as a form of self-examination.

About the artist

Milenko Stevanović was born in Belgrade, Serbia. He holds an MA in Graphic Arts from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade and an MA in Oil Painting from Tokyo University of the Arts. He is an active member of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS) and Cyprus’s Visual Artists and Art Theorists Association (Phytorio). His work has featured in juried exhibitions in Cyprus and internationally, most recently at the Derwent Art Prize and in exhibitions held by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours and the Royal Watercolour Society.

Parallel events

Wednesday, September 24, 19:00: Stevanović in conversation with Diomedes Koufteros
Friday, October 2, 19:00: Guided tour with Michael Pavlides

Opening: Friday, September 18, 2026, 18:30–21:30

Exhibition runs: September 18–October 17, 2026

Where: The Edit Gallery, 1 Agias Zonis Street, 23 Nicolaou Pentadromos Centre, 3026 Limassol

Working hours: Wednesday–Friday, 15:00–19:00; Saturday, 10:00–13:00

About the exhibition

At the centre of Carriers is the act of carrying: to hold, contain, protect and nourish. Rowan’s clay torsos take the form of vessels, breastplates and protective shells, exploring the relationship between bodies and the environments they inhabit.

Drawing on pregnancy, breastfeeding and the transition into motherhood, the works consider how bodies sustain more-than-human life. References to placentas and milk ducts merge with botanical and marine forms: ribs become aloe vera leaves, milk ducts bloom like flowers, and branching patterns echo roots and nervous systems. Through these connections, Rowan extends questions of care and interdependence beyond maternal experience to the exchanges that sustain all living beings.

Protection and vulnerability coexist throughout the series. The sculptures evoke armour shaped around the female body, yet their ceramic material remains fragile. Lustrous, shell-like glazes recall oysters, whose shells accumulate traces of the waters they inhabit, so that both body and shell become records of their surroundings.

About the artist

Hannah Rowan (b. 1990, Brighton, UK) is a British artist based in New York. Her multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, video and sound, working with ceramic, glass, metal and water to explore intimacy, impermanence and the relationship between bodies and ecological systems. Her research has taken her to sites ranging from the Arctic Circle to the Atacama Desert. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, and her work is held in public and private collections including the Dakis Joannou Collection and the Anthropocene Collection at MUSE – Science Museum, Trento.

In 1977, together with a colleague at La Trobe University in Melbourne, I organised a video exhibition. My colleague already knew Bill and his work, so we invited him to Australia to present his videotapes. That was how we first met.

A year later, I moved to New York to live with him and began assisting with the production of his work. The ideas always came from Bill. We travelled extensively to record the projects he had conceived, while I documented the entire process through photography. Gradually, I began to understand his way of working.

We continued to travel widely and spent eighteen months living in Japan before returning to the United States and settling in Long Beach, California. After working for almost two years at the Long Beach Museum of Art, I decided to devote myself entirely to collaborating with Bill.

Over the years, I took responsibility for much of the administrative and organisational side of our practice, from coordinating exhibitions and editing publications to photographing the artworks and assisting with production during shooting. When Bill began working with actors, I became involved in casting, costume selection, fundraising, and managing production budgets and payments. After 10 years of living and working together, we decided to have children. Our two boys were an extra time commitment, especially for me, but somehow, we made it work.

How did Bill develop his ideas, and at what point did your own collaboration begin?

Bill would often spend long periods working alone in his study or retreat somewhere for a few days in order to develop his ideas. Once he felt they had taken shape, we would discuss them together and decide which projects should move into production.

When we started working with film crews in Hollywood, there were occasions when I noticed that certain scenes were drifting away from Bill’s original vision. I felt it was important to protect the essence of his ideas. We were collaborating with highly creative professionals who naturally brought their own perspectives to the production, and sometimes Bill would be persuaded to move in a different direction. My role was often to help keep the work aligned with his original intention.

In later years, our relationship evolved into a genuine creative partnership. My own contribution and ideas became an essential part of the production, direction and editing of works such as Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) (2014) and Mary (2016), both permanently installed at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, as well as Crossroads (2014), a large-scale permanent installation at Hamad International Airport in Doha.

Is there one particular moment that, for you, best captures who Bill Viola was as a person?

I always loved listening to Bill’s lectures and conversations with students. He shared his thoughts on creativity, on inspiration, on consciousness, on the profound mysteries of life, on humanity, on hope.

He encouraged young artists to look inward, to understand who they were and why they wanted to become artists, to recognise the importance of their role, to see, and depict, the world with clarity and honesty, and to never be afraid to tackle the larger themes of life.

Every art student should read the book we created in 1995, edited by Robert Violette, Bill Viola: Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (Writings 1973–1994), published by MIT Press. It is a collection of Bill’s writings and reflections, all still relevant today.

Is there a work by Bill that you see differently today than when it was first created?

It is not often that I look at the early videotapes. We stopped producing them in 1994, when our focus shifted increasingly towards installations and exhibitions.

During the first decade of his career, Bill mostly created shorter videotapes or collections of several individual pieces. Between 1981 and 1994, however, he also produced a number of longer works. One of the most significant is I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), an 89-minute work that took almost three years to complete while several other projects were underway.

Bill described it as “a personal investigation of the inner states and connections to animal consciousness we all carry within.”

When I see it now I am even more impressed by the way all of its elements came together -from the extraordinary locations we travelled to, to the extensive shot lists Bill prepared before we began each shoot.

We recorded in Tokyo, at the San Diego Zoo, in South Dakota, Fiji, a glacial lake in Banff, Canada, and in our own home in Long Beach, which we had transformed into a studio.

Now, forty years after it was made, every section of the work carries an even deeper personal meaning for me.

In an age when images are consumed in a matter of seconds, do you think Bill Viola’s work has become even more relevant?

Images – and moving images in particular – are now everywhere. We live in a world shaped by social media, streaming platforms, 24-hour news cycles and, increasingly, the artificial realities generated by AI. We are losing our ability to distinguish, to question, and to think critically. We are already reaching the point where we can no longer judge if an image is real.

Anyone who experiences a Bill Viola exhibition quickly realises that he used the moving image to deepen the understanding of human existence. By slowing images down, he reveals the subject’s inner life. It is clear that nothing in his work is artificially constructed. There are no CGI effects and no post-production visual manipulation. What you see is real.

Do you think viewers need to be familiar with the philosophical, religious and mystical references in Bill Viola’s work, or is their own personal experience enough?

There are usually very few explanatory texts accompanying the works. Every viewer approaches them through their own experiences, beliefs and understanding of the world. This closes the gap between the work and the viewer.

Of course, a deeper reading of Bill’s work – and of Bill himself – can emerge through a greater understanding of the ideas that informed his practice, whether from an exhibition guide or a catalogue. But that knowledge is by no means essential in order to connect with the work.

Most of those philosophical or spiritual references are not explicitly visible within the works themselves. They were sources of inspiration that helped Bill connect with an idea and with his own inner search.

What, in your view, allows Bill Viola’s work to transcend cultural boundaries and speak to audiences on such a universal level?

Bill made very little use of language in his work, which makes it immediately accessible to audiences around the world.

His work has been presented throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, as well as in Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Russia, Poland and Kazakhstan. Wherever it is shown, people inevitably respond to it through the lens of their own culture, traditions and personal experiences.

Yet the fundamental themes remain universal: human emotion, the passage of time, the cycle of life, death and rebirth, and the continuous flow of existence itself.

Since Bill’s passing, how do you see your role as the steward of his artistic legacy?

My work today is dedicated to preserving Bill’s artistic legacy by continuing our extensive exhibition program, collaborating with art institutions worldwide, and documenting and organising the extraordinary body of material he left behind.

Together with my small team, we are compiling the complete catalogue of his works, digitizingall of the master video materials of each work in collaboration with the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and cataloguing his journals, notebooks and drawings.

These are large-scale, long-term projects, but they are essential if future generations are to fully understand the breadth of Bill’s practice. Additional support for this work would certainly be invaluable.

You have seen Bill Viola’s work presented in museums and cultural institutions around the world. What does Cyprus offer as a context for experiencing his work?

The living, moving images of video installations are always in dialogue with the spaces they inhabit.

When those spaces possess a distinctive architectural character – as is the case with PSI Foundation, where the walls themselves bear the visible traces of history – a unique relationship develops between the artworks and the building.

What is outside these walls, the history of the region, the landscape, the sea, has also entered the building, creating a rich interaction and resonance of elements, that in turn enrich the experience of the viewer.

And, of course, every visitor brings their own identity and personal history with them, transforming each encounter with the work into something deeply individual and personal.

Are there works in this particular exhibition that have taken on a new or different dimension in Cyprus?

Every work Bill created has its own intended scale, but occasionally adjustments need to be made in order to establish a meaningful dialogue with a particular architectural space.

Inverted Birth (2014),the first work visitors encounter in the exhibition, is normally five metres high. Here, however, we installed it on a screen measuring seven and a half metres in height in order to respond to the exceptional scale of the building itself.

This approach acknowledges the architecture, allowing the work to inhabit the space naturally and harmoniously. The meaning of the work does not change because it is presented inside this vast former warehouse. Our experience of it is somehow different since the work is now a part of the fabric and history of this building. Adding to this experience is the sound from Inverted Birth that reverberates in the space, created by its unusual shape. It seems that this is where it was recorded. Master technician and sound artist, Ludger Hennig from 235 Media, was able to “tune” it to the vast interior. In a work titled Anima (2001) time has almost stood still, slowed down, like the archaeological objects such as steles found on Cyprus. In Unspoken (Silver & Gold,) 2001, the ravages of archeological time – weathering, corrosion, deterioration – are visible.

For the remaining works, Bobby Jablonski, Exhibition Design Director at Bill Viola Studio, designed a carefully considered architectural environment within the space itself. This allowed each work to be protected from both natural light and the sound generated by Inverted Birth, while creating a distinctive journey through the exhibition in which each installation unfolds gradually before the visitor.

The exhibition has now been extended and will reopen in September, giving a new audience the opportunity to experience Bill Viola’s work in Cyprus. Will you be returning to see it for yourself?

I am delighted that PSI Foundation has decided to extend the exhibition, and I am especially grateful to the curator, Dimitri Ozerkov, for inviting me to visit Limassol in early October, when I will also be giving a public lecture.

Dimitri’s clear and unwavering vision for this exhibition has been truly inspiring. From the very beginning, he understood how Bill’s work could enter into a meaningful dialogue with this extraordinary building and its unique history.

I am very much looking forward to experiencing the exhibition in person, seeing how the works inhabit this remarkable space, and exploring the archaeological sites that bear witness to the rich and layered history of this strategically important island.

INFO

Bill Viola: Unspoken

PSI Foundation, Limassol

The exhibition reopens on Thursday, 10 September.

Opening Hours

• Thursday & Friday: 17:00 – 22:00
• Saturday: 11:00 – 14:00 & 17:00 – 22:00

Further Information
psi.art

Kira Perov Lecture

Kira Perov will give a public lecture on Sunday, 4 October, at 18:30.

Venue: Tasos Papadopoulos Building, Cyprus University of Technology (CUT/TEPAK), Limassol.

Titled “COEXISTENCE: A. TASSOS – HAMBIS”, the exhibition is curated by Yiannis Bolis in collaboration with the Society of Visual Arts A. Tassos in Athens. Nicosia Mayor Charalambos Prountzos will officially inaugurate the event on Wednesday evening at 19:00.

The exhibition marks a significant milestone for the museum, highlighting how the artistic trajectories of both creators were shaped by the turbulent histories of Greece and Cyprus. While A. Tassos’s work captured twentieth-century Greek struggles—from the dictatorship of the 4th of August and the German Occupation to the Civil War and the colonels’ junta—Hambis’s art reflects the Cypriot experience through British colonial rule, the struggle for independence, the 1974 Turkish invasion, and the ongoing division of the island.

A central theme of the exhibition is the human figure caught in the machinery of history, with both artists focusing on human dignity, freedom, peace, and self-determination.

A. Tassos holds a historical connection to Cyprus, most notably through his artwork Cyprus 1974—depicting a child seated against barbed wire—which became widely recognized as the “Refugee Stamp.” Throughout his career, he also designed and supervised numerous official Cypriot postage stamps highlighting the island’s historical identity and struggles.

The establishment of the Municipal Hambis Printmaking Museum in 2019 extended Hambis Tsangaris’s long-standing effort to promote the art form, which began in 1995 through free printmaking classes offered in memory of A. Tassos at the Hambis School of Printmaking in Platanistia.

The exhibition will run through 24 July 2027. A 200-page illustrated catalogue featuring essays by curator Yiannis Bolis and Irene Orati, President of the Society of Visual Arts A. Tassos, is currently in preparation.