29 Feb 2012

Marianna Christofides | Errant Images at Omikron Gallery, Nicosia, Cyprus

Omikron Gallery proudly presents Marianna Christofides' debut solo show entitled Errant Images, from March 3rd until April 12th, 2012.

Marianna Christofides works mainly with installations, film and text. In her works she indexes a focal point of an alleged reality. Documentary material and found images are thereby used to create documents of the imaginary. In doing so her work orbits around the borders of the real, unveiling and unfolding the stratifications, folds and leaps that make up perceived time. The illusion that territories and people can fit in predetermined frames is furthermore challenged. Christofides' works address and question the way an environment fabricated by culture is being at once visually represented and physically experienced over the course of time. At the same time her poetic imagery evokes an illusion of a travel through a world, both familiar and unfamiliar, fictitious despite its seemingly realistic nature.

For the exhibition Errant Images at Omikron Gallery Nicosia Marianna Christofides has developed a new series of works in which she examines the perceptional possibilities lying beyond the pictured. The artist searches for images which lead the viewer's eye towards an outer fringe, an inherent option within detail. Working primarily with magic lantern slides alongside text and film she attempts to give a new framework to images that seem to have fallen out of time, generating in this way extended narratives that oscillate between fact and fiction.


Text by Denise Robinson. Rewritten fragments from the catalogue essay 'A World Deprived of all its Centres' for the exhibition Errant Images.

''The work of Marianna Christofides encounters the unyielding draw we have to place, through a topological movement in images. A crystalline structure is emblematized in a jewel-like object, back-lit from below, an image on glass - a magic lantern slide. First imagined and developed in the 17th century and put to the service of various forms of illusion in the centuries since – the perversions of religious beliefs; the hypersensitivity for never-before-seen illusions in the displays of phantasmagoria; tourist images and unknowable contexts. Any fantasy of a return to another time/technology is swept away in the context of the work Flyaway Inlays, where the invention of the 'other' is wonderfully observed, through maps and the naming of maps, a play on cartography. The notion of 'Phantom Islands' is reprised with the display of maps of cities and countries circa 1914. Cut up and pasted to fit, they elude any similarity to a place or their cartographic use as a colonising tool – wholly unlike the maps, so violent and familiar in the colonial project of re-drawing territories.
If we can think about 'a world deprived of all its centres' then the crystalline work in this exhibition is 'l' histoire d' histoire d'une histoire'. Images from magic lantern slides transferred onto 35mm celluloid film slides are projected in a framework of doubles. One distant technology meets another, less distant, to set off an event. We see the traces of the image imprint of the magic lantern slide, around its still glass borders while the slow tempo of the slide projector clicks through images and the orchestrated darkness between - the place where we will at times hear a voiceover. Sequences of images appear to repeat, yet a small number are altered incrementally, others added, doubled or moved. The entire ensemble leaves the beholder with the ineffability of the duration in images and the voice. Projected onto a wide black strip it is panoramic, a precursor of cinema and performs a kind of Nietzschean return - not to another time - a return that is never the return of the same''.

Marianna Christofides (*1980 Cyprus, lives in Cologne) co-represented Cyprus at the 54th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia 2011. She studied Visual and Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Athens, the Slade School of Fine Art London and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
For 2012 she has obtained the Schloss Balmoral project scholarship. In 2011 she received the Jean-Claude Reynal Scholarship, France and in 2010 the Friedrich-Vordemberge Grant for Visual Arts by the City of Cologne. Since 2000 she has received numerous scholarships and prizes, among which by the A.S. Onassis Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD.
Selected exhibitions and screenings 2012 Dear Aby Warburg, What to do with images? Museum of Contemporary Art, Siegen / Sense of Place. European landscape photography, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels / Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica (solo) / Speaking of Reality, Theartspace, Düsseldorf 2011 Temporal Taxonomy, la Biennale di Venezia / 57th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen / localhost, AzKM Contemporary Art Space, Münster 2010 Chypre 2010: L'Art au Présent, Paris 2009 Along the Rhine – Cologne/Düsseldorf, Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf / XIV Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, Skopje.