Ethnolatria and Traumatolatria:
Art, Gender, Cyprus and the Re(li)gion
Natis & Dr Avgi Saketopoulou

How does art-making (not) serve power? When do the identity categories by which we perceive and are perceived become psychologically unsustainable, turning subjectivity into a prison? What converts interdependent collectivism into ethnocentrism? When does a gender category become an instrument of internalised control? What happens to our traumatic events when we are rewarded for their aestheticisation in the arts?
Natis and Avgi meet in Nicosia, an impossible homeland for them both, to explore these seemingly disconnected but nevertheless allied questions with the audience at the intersection of psychoanalysis, politics, and art.

The conversation will be delivered in English.

Natis is a conceptual painter based in Berlin and Nicosia. His work interrogates collective and individual psychic landscapes in relation to the genealogy of the Artist, particularly as shaped by Western ideals. Moving between distinct practices, Natis works and thinks through multiple performative artist personae: Hasan Aksaygın (the name and subjectivity assigned to him at birth), Hank Yan Agassi, and Hasso Weiß Ehrenwerth. Each persona offers a distinct investigative position from which to approach the Artist as an invented subject shaped by socio-regulatory forces and intricate power relations. Natis is currently pursuing a doctoral research project titled Heteronymy in Contemporary Visual Art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK Hamburg).

Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst working in New York City. She teaches at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and holds the 2025–2026 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include trauma, aesthetic experience, queer and trans life, race, and immigration. Avgi’s work has received several professional awards, and one of her interviews is held in the permanent collection of the Freud Museum (Vienna). She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, co-author with Ann Pellegrini of Gender Without Identity, and, in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone, The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche. Avgi founded both the Cypriot and the Greek chapters of the Palestine Mental Health Network, serves on the Arts Council of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and is a founding member of P-HOLE. "Ethnolatria and Traumatolatria" takes place as part of the Kartzin Socially Engaged Arts (SEA) Lab programming, a Visual Voices initiative co-funded by the Commonwealth Foundation. Updates and announcements are published on social media and through a mailing list dedicated to the socially engaged arts.