With her new exhibition Newcomers at the Minerva Hotel in Platres, Maria Loizidou invites us into a place where the conventional perception of time is replaced by a temporal cross section that allows us to journey back and forth between past and present.

Locals and foreigners alike found respite from the hot Mediterranean summers in this hotel in mountainous Limassol, while people fleeing neighboring 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 us to navigate the hotel spaces by restoring their original identity as receptacles. Through the hotel’s ephemeral reuse, she seeks to emotionally attune us 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. Through this effort, the artist aims to contribute to our understanding of the contemporary need for temporary habitation while raising questions inherent in the dynamics of contemporary history.

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.

The installation Newcomers is accompanied by a text of Alexandra Landré ( Artistic director, Stroom Den Haag) and developed in five sections and an intermediate space at Minerva hotel:

-Reception room – The welcoming: Music chairs, 2025

-Newcomers - Where am I Now? Where Am I now, 2023, drawing, pencil on paper

-Storage room: Sculptures from the two last exhibitions: of Maria Loizidou: Moi Balbuzard Migrant, 2023 Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, The Place I Am Not, 2024, Freud Museum, and Hellenic Center, London

-The Space in Between: An archive of drawing’s notebooks

-Sleeping rooms, no entry: Screen, 2018

-Dreams area: Dormitory room, 2025, About time, 2025, The lost object, 2001, No entry - Don’t disturb, 2025

The exhibition at the Minerva Hotel in Platres will run from 10/05/2025 to 14/09/2025 and will include parallel performances and workshops:

• What happens to me is written up there, Rialto Theatre, Limassol, 17/05/2025, performance 19:00–22:00

Performative, video and sound, installation

Concept - curated by Maria Loizidou

Sound installation, 2025 by Manos Stratis, Evagoras Bekiaris with the participation of Elana Sasson, Andreas Zembylas

Video-animation, 2022 by Nefeli Kentoni, photography, Vassos Stylianou, drawings digitation by Mariel Kouveli

Edition design by Anastasia Mina

Facilitators: Maria Agisilaou, Marianna Giannaki, Ioli Kaskani, Nayia T. Karacosta, Christos Loizou, Maria Papageorgiou, Belinda Papavasiliou, Annie Khoury

Production: Pylon Art & Culture

• The objects look at us, Minerva Hotel, Platres, 28/06/2025, performance / auction 18:00–20:00, Performer: Loukia Pieridou

• Let’s talk about ‘the object little a’, Minerva Hotel, Platres, workshop, details to be announced later.

• Audio Guide

An audio-guide walkthrough of the exhibition 'Newcomers' narrated by the artist Maria Loizidou.

about the artist

Maria Loizidou (b.1958, Limassol, Cyprus) lives and works in Nicosia. Her practice interweaves personal and political references in relation to the history of colonialism, war, oppression, minorities, and the deprivation of social welfare. Her work combines drawings with pencil, animation, video, sculpture, and knitting through collective workshops. She is one of the artists participating in the next Liverpool Biennial, 2025. Recently, it has been presented in installations such as Volant Migrants, in collaboration with Luma Foundation, for the exhibition Energies, Gstaad, (2024), The Place I Am Not, in collaboration with Freud Museum London and Hellenic Center, London (2024), Olgas Garden, Limassol-Athens, and Volant Migrants, in collaboration with NEON for the exhibition Space of togetherness, Athens (2024), Moi Balbuzard Migrant, in collaboration with the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (2023); Monumental lightness, in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery for the exhibition A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920–2020, London (2020) and Portals, in collaboration with NEON, at the Former Tobacco Factory, Athens (2020).

In 1986, she represented Cyprus at the 43rd Venice Biennale with the work The Myth of Ariadne in three acts, and in 2017 she participated in Documenta 14, with the work Collective Autobiographie (2011). Her works activate public space, creating a platform for interaction and discussion, emphasising the power of fragility.

She participates in the European program SPACEX and collaborates with the NCAD schools of Dublin, University of the Arts Amsterdam and University of Applied Arts Vienna for artistic guidance in the field of visual arts, in the development of relationships of the commons.

Her collaboration with AA&U For Architecture, Art and Urbanism allows her to focus on similar issues on an interdisciplinary level.

http://www.marialoizidou.com/

>download press release (Greek)
>download press release (English)
>What happens to me is written up there (Greek)
>What happens to me is written up there (English)