Of Monumental is an interdisciplinary bi-communal project foregrounded in previous work of visual artist PASHIAS, led by intercommunal cultural NGO Visual Voices and co-funded by the Deputy Ministry of Culture. By exploring the commemorative public art landscape of Cyprus through performance art, photography and multimodal ethnography, Of Monumental results in a layered exhibition to take place in December 2025.
The project explores the evolving role of public art monuments in shaping collective memory and negotiating contested narratives. We approach them as relational entities within broader historical, social and political frameworks, shaping and being shaped by diverse subjectivities, discourses and imaginaries.
We are exploring two key questions: How do public art monuments embody and negotiate shifting narratives of identity, memory and reconciliation in Cyprus? Additionally, in what ways can aesthetic and performative interventions reveal or subvert the contested meanings and mediated representations of public spaces and materialities, thereby reconfiguring collective memories and redefining the commons?
Acknowledging the ‘agency’ and ‘biography’ of monuments as dynamic artifacts, Of Monumental views them as open circuits for new relationships and narratives accrued over time.
Building a fresh layer of sediment on this history, the project engages with the semantically dynamic nature of public art monuments through artistic interventions and systemic research on 10 diverse public art monuments across the divide, including “The Poet” (1983) by Costas Varotsos in Nicosia, the 1948 Miners Strike monument (2018) in Lefke and “The Big Potato” (2021) in Xylophagou.
Internationally renowned visual artist PASHIAS, with a long-standing practice on public art interventions, explores how the human body and the medium of moving image can offer renewed and embodied perspectives on these historical markers, as experienced in space and time. Simultaneously, the research team led by Dr Dimitris Venizelos, architect and human geographer with research interests on the politics of space and its representations, and Rahme Veziroglu, audiovisual artist, researcher and filmmaker with a body of work rooted in activism, human rights and reconciliation, studies the histories of these public artifacts by assembling alternative and unexpected narratives through stakeholder interviews, archival research and media documentation. A final exhibition curated by Melina Philippou showcases a visual portfolio of research on the 10 public art monuments, alongside their artistic reconfigurations, illuminating these parallel processes of history-making.
The research and artistic methodology developed in Of Monumental is a scalable framework for future iterations, aspiring for an expanded exploration of Cyprus' public art landscape.
Of Monumental is co-funded by “Politismos II”, 2025 of the Deputy Ministry of Culture, Republic of Cyprus.
Project team
Visual Voices: Melina Philippou (Architect-Urbanist & Artistic Director), Alden Jacobs (Co-founder & Director of Program Development), Selin Genc (Art Historian & Cultural Anthropologist, Artistic & Community Manager)
In collaboration with: Dr. Dimitris Venizelos (Senior Lecturer, Department of Architecture & Landscape, Kingston University - UK), PASHIAS (Visual Artist, Curator), Rahme Veziroglu (Audiovisual Artist)
