Cyprus Pavilion - la Biennale di Venezia

✨ 𝗖𝘆𝗽𝗿𝘂𝘀 𝗣𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 – 𝗩𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗕𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲✨ �
𝘐𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴, Marina Xenofontos curated by Kyle Dancewicz
Τμήμα Σύγχρονου Πολιτισμού Κύπρου/ Department of Contemporary Culture CY

For the Cyprus Pavilion of the 61st Biennale di Venezia, Xenofontos will exhibit works in sculpture, sound, and film that register cadences of social life, religious transgression, and cultural endurance.

Over the last fifteen years, Xenofontos has made artworks that store and retrieve information. Her works across media are entries into and products of what the artist has called an “unconditional archive,” or
an accumulation of interrelated ideas, fragments of political memory, physical objects, and social conditions that undergird the present.

Xenofontos’ new and re-presented works grow from a study of anti-spectacular machines, motors, and automata, and from an idiosyncratic sense for data and metadata – the collected debris of experience that clings to life. As heavy as its recursions could potentially feel, Xenofontos’ work instead generates an ineffable, sometimes shimmering, escape from the baggage of lived or almost-lived history, followed by its inevitable transfiguration and return.

📅 May 6–8: Preview�📅 May 9 – Nov 22: Public opening�📍 Associazione Culturale Spiazzi, Venice

🪨 Room 3: Placing

In the third space a circular drystone structure has been assembled to create a form of communality that fulfills one of architecture’s basic roles: to create relationships where none existed before. Through this process created by artisans Argyris Panayiotou and Panayiotis Panayiotou in real time within the pavilion with Cortemilia sandstone, the collective effort of making the structure was revealed. Surrounding the exhibition is the fragmented ambient soundscape of artist Elena Savvidou who creates a sense of suspended timelessness by weaving digital compositions with field recordings. The spatiality of the monolithic structure is enhanced and transformed into its surfaces by the lighting hues of Demetris Shammas who has composed shifting subtle rhythms of warm to cool hues of the sun’s natural cycle.

Sound artist: Elena Savvidou
Light design: Demetris Shammas
Mural drawings: Aaron Gatt



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🪨 Room 2: Sorting
The second space reflects on how hand and eye coordination begin to differentiate the randomness of different stones, organising them into an act of sorting into eight different sizes and typologies before they are assembled into a structure. Sorted stones are broken down into modular typologies which display craft singularly into a sophistication of solids but also voids, which then becomes identified, once it can be ‘read’ in the assembled structures.

An installation by incorporates three short films co-directed with Andreas Anastasiades, with shots by Keti Papadema and sound support by Alexandra Astreou-Karides, which are ‘suspended’ between the stones. Narratives based on semi-fictional scripts blend storytelling and artistic research through montage, beyond descriptive material functionality. The film installation also reveals real-time dynamic processes of gathering, sorting and assembly which are concealed or even dismissed within the monumentality of completed drystone structures. Intricacies of the process are shared by craftsmen and women of Salamiou in Cyprus, a terraced community still practicing the intangible heritage of drystone.

Stools made from wild Cerula Communalis (Anathrika in Greek-Cypriot, Gavcar in Turkish-Cypriot) crafted by Angelos Papatheocharous and , are provided for visitors. A decorated Birdnest, modeled by and made by high school children highlights the more-than-human environment that drystone landscape generates.

Mural drawings by Aaron Gatt.





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🪨 Room 1: Gathering

The first space recalls natural accumulations during gathering stones, assembled collectively, while fields are cleared for cultivation in the process. Stones introduce themselves and their materiality discretely as they become recognised through typologies that find their place, gradually becoming apparent in sequences that follow. Drystone farming landscapes carry value beyond their technical functionality. They are imbued with poetry where the geological, the natural world and human imagination converge (Emmerick, 2016).
The stones placed in the window have been assembled to recall a curse, or an anathematisma. This borrows from traditional rural practices of both spatial and moral historic statements against injustice. Blocking a space with stones, or creating a monumental pile expresses a form of communal cursing or banishment, demonstrating visually against collective injustice inflicted upon a community. This form of drystone assemblage was a way of monumentalising people’s resistance through the lasting materiality of piled stones.




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La Biennale di Venezia



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(Reposting) Next week, (to the stones) we lent you our breath and you whispered it back to the earth, opens at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia

The Cyprus Pavilion exhibition is housed in Associazione Culturale Spiazzi  , from May 10 until November 23, 2025.

Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday, May 10 to September 28, 11am–7pm. September 29 to November 23: 10am–6pm.

We are so excited! More details about the exhibition in bio.

Graphic Design by Miriam Gatt

(to the stones) we lent you our breath and you whispered it back to the earth — Pavilion of Cyprus at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

(to the stones) we lent you our breath and you whispered it back to the earth - Announcements - e-flux Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale presents: (to the stones) we lent you our breath and you whispered it back to the earth.

Big thanks to Lamia Abukhadra & Mizna for the review of The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost? - Mizna Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the sm...

ΑΝΟΙΚΤΗ ΠΡΟΣΚΛΗΣΗ / AÇIK ÇAĞRI / OPEN CALL

ΜΠΙΕΝΑΛΕ ΒΕΝΕΤΙΑΣ 2026 - Συμμετοχή της Κύπρου στην 61η Διεθνή Έκθεση Σύγχρονης Τέχνης (Απρίλιος – Νοέμβριος 2026) / VENEDİK BİENALİ 2026 - Kıbrıs’ın 61. Uluslararası Çağdaş Sanat Sergisi’ne Katılımı (Nisan – Kasım 2026) / VENICE BIENNALE 2026 - Participation of Cyprus in the 61st International Art Exhibition – Biennale Arte 2026 (April – November 2026)

ΕΛ
https://www.gov.cy/politismos/symmetochi-tis-kyprou-stin-61i-diethni-ekthesi-sygchronis-technis/
TR
https://www.pio.gov.cy/assets/pdf/newsroom/2025/03/18032025Press%20Release%20VB26%20-tr.pdf
EN
https://www.gov.cy/en/culture/participation-of-cyprus-in-the-61st-international-art-exhibition-biennale-arte-2026/

Forever Informed interview with Alessandro Cazzola thanks to NERO Editions and Giulia Crispiani!

On a Wildflower-lined Gravel Track | NERO A conversation with Forever Informed

Big thanks to Parathyro and Christothea Iacovou:

«Σε έναν ανθισμένο χωματόδρομο δίπλα από μια ήσυχη πάροδο…» Οι εξελίξεις γύρω από τη Λωρίδα της Γάζας τρέχουν και η κατάπαυση του πυρός λέγεται πως ήρθε... ένα αίτημα το οποίο διεκδίκησε και η κυπριακή συμμετοχή της Κύπρου στ....