A new exhibition is about to join the capital city’s art scene, presenting the works of a group of artists and their ceramic installations. Titled This Vessel is a Shapeshifting Beast: Lessons in Plasticity, it opens on Tuesday, running until the end of the month.

Synthesising centuries of local and traditional cultural practices, exchanges and methodologies with reflections on new advanced technologies, the 9th Installation Festival EFE of E.KA.TE curated by Evagoria Dapola, presents ceramic installations that arrive to show new points of hybridity.

The exhibition programme highlights the fundamental property of the ceramic medium to remember, resulting in an intimate interplay between the material itself with its inherent memory for touch and the medium’s collective memory and vitality since the early days of humanity. In doing so, the exhibition also touches on a very monumental sense of play and mania. The artists (Natalia Manta, Simoni Philippou, Nicoletta Savvidou and Vassos Demetriou) delve into the virtually undetectable – a sudden burst of light.

Using such an organic material with a high degree of traceability allows artists to bring into play notions such as plasticity and liquidity, while also questioning the processes of care within artistic labour, introducing the concepts of tenderness and softness, and reiterating the relationship between body and land.

The abstract language is combined with figurative components, creating a fertile realm for plastic experimentation and sparking the beholder’s creative thinking. These artworks, positioned amid utility and ceremony, address complex subjects by fusing cultural and material storytelling with social communal practices, gatherings and tender care. The final outcomes take on autonomous shapes, installations that adhere to their own internal logic, that is preceded by a process of contemplation on substance, method and concept.

The various techniques and materials used indicate the physical and psychological qualities of these installations. Bringing all of these threads together, the artists’ installations travel across time and space, asserting themselves through aggression, persuasion and magnetism.

The ceramic installations here are not optimised for efficiency or utility here; rather engaging with the slow, malleable, almost liquid and accident-prone medium encourages spectators to stop feeling stuck and connect with the installations on their own terms maintaining the freedom to subvert shared ideas and consider works that remain functionless, openly anti-utilitarian and yet timeless. A gentle reminder that this functionlessness is an area of infinite freedom: the installations loosen and grow ever more open to potential while being incredibly dynamic.

This Vessel is a Shapeshifting Beast: Lessons in Plasticity

Group exhibition with ceramic installations. March 18-31. Film Etc. Engomi, Nicosia. Opening: 7pm. Thursday-Friday: 5pm-7pm. Saturday: 11am-1pm or by appointment