Duration
19.10.18-23.11.18
MLNY The title of the show is an acronym for Maria Loizidou Natalie Yiaxi, suggesting the coming together of two artists who in the recent past have shared many responsibilities, worries and hours of talktime, as a result of their participation in the commons of the local art community. Today, they are invited to occupy a different space and to communicate within a different context.
MLNY captures their response to the architectural idiosyncrasies of the space and indicates the unravelling of their practices, for the discovery of shared touch points and moments of like-mindedness.
Maria Loizidou pushes handcraft and fragility to their limits. She perceives the body as an entity that writes and imagines and, by extension, as a source of reflection and thought generation. In MLNY, she presents new artworks that define new possibilities of coexistence in a space, through the control of positioning and through the movements of the body, favouring architectural points in space that anyone can approach and live in.
Natalie Yiaxi actively wonders how one can uncover the everyday without transcending it, by constantly inventing ways to capture it “sideways”. Her works span from video to spoken word poetry and writing, objects, and artist’s books. Language is their binding agent. In MLNY she is presenting new work –reliefs and sculptures—in which language and conversation are encoded, yet never present.
Maria Loizidou is a visual artist, educated in Lyon, France and settled in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has taken part in exhibitions (Documenta 14, 2017, Venice Biennale of Art, Cyprus National participation, Arsenal 1986 and Architecture, Cyprus and Greek National group participation, 2016, 2006, 2004). She created public projects (Kerameikos, Athens, Fatima, Portugal, Futuroscope, Poitier) and gave lectures in various institutions. Relevant collaborations with museums (MAMC, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Saint Etienne, Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon, Benaki Museum, Athens,EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Sungkok Museum, Seoul, Bozar: Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) keep renewing her work’ s perspective enriching it with social and political concerns giving emphasis to “the power of fragility”. Her collaboration with AA & U For Architecture, Art and Urbanism has given her the possibility to address such issues on an interdisciplinary level.
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Natalie Yiaxi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She is a graduate of Coventry School of Art and Design, the Center for Cultural and Media Policy Studies of Warwick University and Camberwell College of Arts in London. She is working around the politics of the everyday and she uses language in order to access the unnoticed and the invisible in the quotidian. Her work has been showcased in galleries and artist-run spaces in Cyprus and abroad and she has participated in exhibitions organized by foundations and institutions such as DESTE, Athens, EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Megaron- The Athens Concert Hall, Benaki Museum, Athens, MAC Niteroi, Brazil. In 2013 she was among the artists who represented Cyprus at the 55th Venice Biennale. She is the co-founder of the artist-run gallery PARTY Contemporary.