A site-specific exhibition opens in Platres this May as Maria Loizidou presents her newest artistic work. Newcomers invites viewers into a place where the conventional perception of time is replaced by a temporal cross-section that allows them to journey back and forth between past and present.

From May 10 to September 14, Platres visitors will be able to explore the artwork at Minerva Hotel and contemplate the process of migration, movement and refuge. The location of the exhibition is central to its theme.

Locals and foreigners alike found respite from the hot Mediterranean summers in this hotel in mountainous Limassol, while people fleeing neighbouring countries at war found temporary shelter. The exhibition refers precisely to this movement: the movement in response to the need for survival and remedy in new circumstances; the movement before adversity, temporary or not; the movement in the face of loss, small or great.

The artist invites viewers to navigate the hotel spaces by restoring their original identity as receptacles. Through the hotel’s ephemeral reuse, she seeks to emotionally attune visitors to a living environment as a framework through which to address an ever-evolving condition: that of the movement of humans in search of a temporary home not for the sake of comfort and pleasure, but as a shelter that may provide some essential services.

Connecting her queries to the space itself – whether that space be historically charged or not – is part of the artist’s practice, and so in the case of the Minerva Hotel, too, the design she conceived for the exhibition is of equal importance to her as the construction of her works.

Here, the fundamental elements used in the design are words, fabric, sound and lighting – elements that change in the course of the exhibition in accordance with the changing needs. The space has been divided into five sections plus an intermediate passage.

In a continuous exchange between the space and the work, the visitor moves and evolves through the reception room, the dining room, the tv room, the staircase, and the bedrooms, encountering installations with the artist’s works and objects from the hotel related to each other through unconventional gestures – minor constellations that illuminate paths of contemplation and that function as tools for introspection.

Newcomers

Exhibition by Maria Loizidou. May 10-September 14. Minerva Hotel, Platres. Opening: 6pm-9pm. Saturday – Sunday 11am-6pm or by appointment. www.marialoizidou.com