Exhibition looks at occupied history of Cyprus village

The Larnaca Municipal Art Gallery will host the new art exhibition by Toula Liasi this week, Synchronising History. The exhibition opens in the coastal town this Friday and runs until the end of July with more than 55 artworks: paintings, photographs, videos and installations.

Synchronising History focuses on the artist’s home in the occupied village of Ayia Triada and places emphasis on its history and objects. Liasi’s ultimate goal is to rescue, through her art, these indisputably historical objects and to transform them into artistic evidence of memory and identity, resistance and survival of a small number of enclaved people.

As curator of the exhibition Xenios Symeonides says: “Toula creates a new condition, transforms the ‘house’ from an existing three-dimensional space into a third intermediate conceptual place, into a space-time capsule, where the objects dominate and are integrated into the space as evidence of a new ‘acceptable’ present. She is not interested in that which is obvious. She creates a new narrative, a palimpsest.

“A new writing material that has been superimposed on an earlier one, with the objects treated as traces, as fragments of some previously existing situation. The synchronised story of Toula Liasi brings back what we have been deprived of for a long time – the virtue of boldness. She creates and synchronises two ‘presents’, new temporal events in which she will redefine her existence, her identity, her own truth. She will discover that nothing of the past is superfluous; it just lacks the self-efficiency of essence; self-efficiency that only art can freely grant; her own art.”

Synchronising History

Solo exhibition by Toula Liasi. April 26-July 31. Larnaka Municipal Art Gallery, Larnaca. Opening night: 7.30pm. Monday–Friday: 9am-1pm and 4pm-7pm. Saturday: 10am-1pm. www.toulaliasi.nl. Tel: 24-658848