Nurturing What Might Still Be

The Fine Art Programme of the Department of Design and Multimedia of the University of Nicosia in collaboration with Kartzin by Visual Voices is pleased to present Nurturing What Might Still Be, the final degree show of graduating students: Chara Charalambidou, Andrea Efstathiou, Anmari Gregoriou, Sia Kourtseva, Mariia Nikolskaia, Georgia Perikleous, Niki Rabiie. Nurturing What Might Still Be is a phrase drawn from Donna Haraway’s Staying With Trouble (2016). In thinking of collective responsibilities and new beginnings, the feminist theorist evokes the concept of kainos, the Greek word for ‘new’, imagining it as a ground ‘full of comings, nurturing ‘what might still be’, through ongoing, messy entanglements and practices of coexistence. Haraway believes coexistence speaks of the necessity of tending to earthly and human wounds, cultivating bonds and sympoiesis, a form of collaborative and interdependent world-making with more-than-human others. Drawing from Haraway’s ideas the artists engage in close rapport with elements such as fire, air, earth and water, approaching landscape as an active field of encounter. These elements are not treated symbolically, but as material conditions that shape experience. By exploring how they erode, sustain or transform the environment, their relation to the past and the present, as well as the personal, global and ecological struggles of our time, the viewer is prompted to consider the fragile continuity of human and more-than-human presence in the landscape. In this exhibition, landscape holds multiple times and experiences, surpassing ‘conventional pasts, presents and futures’, while still allowing kinship to endure after disruption. Drawings bring intimacy and loss into focus, layering and distorting moments drawn from family photo albums, landscapes, figures, and material traces of presence through repetitive acts of mark-making. These are presented alongside works that engage situated knowledge and lived experiences of place, including backyards, forest sites, and beaches, using methods such as embodied movement, light-based photographic processes, and altered states of perception. Sculpture and installation explore materiality through the reconstruction of found materials and a return to sustainable, traditional practices that resist the ease of industrial production. Elements such as fire, soil and water play into discussions around the notions of the landscape, its exhaustion from wildfires, extraction and commodification of natural resources. Soil acts both as a gesture and surface, revealing the existing frequencies of the earth, and in some cases, remains of scorched land are embedded into the canvas, revealing the aftermath of a fire; an element that regenerates and burns all in unbroken expanse. Wildgrass and rocks surround abandoned homes in landscapes with a ghostly presence, carving omnipresent memories subject to distortion. Air creates space, holding light and movement in intimate landscape settings. Seashells are a sedimentation of erosion, growth and transformation, as their environment - sand and water - mould an existence within an ever changing origin. River and clay flow hand in hand, unifying the gifts of the earth with the craft of ‘mortal earthlings’. In doing so, the exhibition space becomes a shared ground for nurturing “a thick, ongoing presence” of responsibility and collaboration on our earth.