2012

How to Make a Garden

Saturday, February 4 at noon

opening


Haris Epaminonda and
Daniel Gustav Cramer
Phanos Kyriacou
Maria Loizidou
Panayiotis Michael
Polys Peslikas
Alexadros Pissourios
Efi Savvides
Socratis Socratous
participating artists

Elena Parpa
curator







How to Make a Garden examined the notion of the garden having as a starting impulse the history of the Municipal Garden in Nicosia. The garden was initially designed during British colonial rule by Greek botanist Panayiotis Gennadios. It was re-landscaped in the 1960s, when the island gained its Independence, by Cypriot architect Neoptolemos Michaelides, who envisioned a garden that would creatively mix the plants of its colonial past with the ‘indigenous’ and the exotic. In the exhibition, reference to Michaelides’s vision was made with the incorporation of archival material, including a written statement by the architect detailing his ideas. In the work of the participating artists, other aspects of the garden’s history were referenced—such as its later transformation into a cruising site—, at the same time that the garden was explored as a notion through various conjunctions, such as the garden as archive, as memory, as utopia, as shelter, as existing on the culture/nature divide.

Elena Parpa




︎︎︎