Pylon
/ˈpʌɪlən/

Responding to Pylon’s invitation to think of ways to make contemporary art more accessible and relevant to a wider audience, curators Elena Parpa, Thalia Spyridou and Evagoras Vanezis present three exhibitions and a series of events under the title Safely Held with the aim to contribute to the public’s engagement with art and its practice. The programme unfolds throughout the course of seven months, from May to December 2023. The exhibitions’ overarching concept evolves in response to pylon, the chosen name of the newly-found art and culture initiative. There are structures in society and in governance, in education and in thought, in expression and behavior. Some are rigid, others fragile or defective. They could also be supportive, comforting, even protective. Irrespective of their properties, structures speak of the need for things to be arranged and held together. The three exhibitions seek to encourage the concept of structures being shapeable, permitting reconsideration of established narratives.

How to use the fragility and uncertainty of social conditions as a driving force towards a softer approach to contemporary experience, that opposes and challenges the rigidity of organized structures?

What are the urgent questions that animate our relationship to language, and how do artists explore them? The exhibition approaches the theme of cultural exchange by focusing on the practices of translation and rewriting as creative tools.

How does an artwork conceived for the Limassol Municipal Garden as a structure within a structure, challenge our understanding of memorial art and at the same time calls for an expanded concept of the function and structure of a public space that has been the subject of a recent controversy?

In seeking to engage the public with the ideas and questions explored, the exhibitions will be accompanied by a series of events within and beyond the exhibition space.

EXHIBITION 3

C.P. and “Of Other ‘Garden’ Spaces”

Αrtist: Raissa Angeli
Curated by Elena Parpa

Duration:
21 October - 9 December 2023

NOTE: From October 21-22 the exhibition will be open on a 24h basis. From 11:00 οn October 21st until 18:00 on October 22nd. In the framework of Limassol Art Walks.
26 Οctober - 09 December: Thursday and Friday 17:00-20:00, Saturday 11:00-14:00.

The project isolates elements from the proposal for a monument under the same title dedicated to the artist’s grandfather and ex-mayor of Limassol, Costas Partassides (1919-1977). The monument was intended for the Limassol Public Garden and was designed in collaboration with Arsentiy Lysenkov, Superside studio - Eleonora Antoniadou and the group 100 Years Costas Partassides.

Partassides served as mayor of the city between the years 1949-1950 and 1953-1962 and was one of the main instigators of the Public Garden’s redesign in 1962. Adhering to the logic of the mise en abyme, the monument proposes a “garden within a garden”. It is composed through references to Partassides’ life and work and functions to activate both historical memory and reflection on the nature of the garden, its intrinsic characteristics and the ideas that define it, with particular emphasis on the notion of heterotopia.

The association with the particular concept is encouraged by the title of the work, which creatively paraphrases Michel Foucault's Of Other Spaces (Des Espaces Autres 1967/1984). In the text, originally delivered as a lecture in 1967, the French philosopher introduces the notion of ‘heterotopia’ to describe the spaces of the ‘other’ and uses the example of the garden to refer to their capacity to juxtapose “in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”. In the proposal C.P. and “Of Other ‘Garden’ Spaces”, the heterotopic dimension of the garden is activated to encourage its understanding as a site where peripheral or marginalised histories are considered to offer the possibility for a more meaningful relationship to the past and the present.

The proposal for the monument never materialised. In the space of Pylon Art & Culture, the monument is broken down to its individual parts in a kind of creative subversion of both the monument itself and the structures that exclude its realisation at a time when the proposed site of its construction, the Limassol Public Garden, is found at the centre of discussions around the urban development of the city.

The exhibition is accompanied by a parallel programme of discussions:

Limassol in the 1940s - 1950s
Saturday, October 21 |18:00 - 20:00 | Pylon Art & Culture, 1A Athenon, 3041, Limassol and via zoom at: https://zoom.us/j/99066717901

Bahçes histories* of Cyprus responds to the invitation to participate in the exhibition’s programme of parallel events and organises the discussion entitled Limassol in the 1940s - 1950s. With bahçes editor Loizos Kapsalis as moderator, the discussion will centre on the social, cultural and political transformations taking place in Cyprus during the 1940s and 1950s, with particular focus on the influx of new ideas about education, social reform and welfare, and the development of Limassol during this period.

Language: English
The bαhcές editorial team are Aliosha Bielenberg, Maria K. Georgiou, Nur Çetiner, Loizos Kapsalis, Evrensel Sebep, Okcan Yıldırımtürk.
For more on their activities visit the link: https://www.historiesofbahces.org/

Exhibition Floor Plan + Bios

Curatorial note

Garden Light Ι (c. 1980, found, Limassol Municipal Garden).
Standard Tree Rose Ι (pink).
Garden Light Ι (c. 1980, found, Limassol Municipal Garden).
Standard Tree Rose 2 (white).
Costas Partassides bust by Arsentiy Lysenkov.
Garden Light ΙΙ (c. 1970, found, Limassol Municipal Garden).
Cercis Siliquastrum (Κουτσουπιά).
Miniature of architectural structure as found in the Limassol Municipal Garden following its reconstruction in 1961.
Proposed monument model to Costas Partassides.