The document provides a detailed summary and analysis of the UNACCOMPANIED art exhibition held at the Cyprus Library. It discusses the various artworks included in the exhibition which explore themes of identity, cultural understanding, border crossings, and experiences of otherness. The artworks used visual, textual and comparative means to examine issues around globalization, localization, and appropriation. The exhibition created a space for viewers to have a meaningful discussion and confrontation with unfamiliar concepts and perspectives. In total, over 20 artists contributed artworks exploring topics like digital identity, audience reception across cultures, collective experiences, and the psychology of architecture and place.

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UNACCOMPANIED: A short critical analysis
by Maria Hadjiathanasiou
UNACCOMPANIED may be perceived as an investigative, artistic attempt that brings into focus
the realities of an ‘un-attended’ life, so as to reach out to them, acknowledge them, and if
nothing else, come to terms with them. In this respect, it feels that the exhibition’s title, is an
effective paradox that downplays the relationship between artworks, between artworks and
viewers, curator and viewers, curator and artworks, creating the false impression that one does
not accompany the other. In truth, instead of making imposing statements, it rather allows
rather than invites, instigates rather than challenges, a sensitive and receptive viewer to
research and discover the ‘connective tissue’ that not only bridges one with the other, but also
expands their reach.
In this site-specific installation, sheltered in the space of the Cyprus Library, issues - concerns -
stories (depending on how the viewer receives them) of border crossings and confines; of
transcultural understandings and misunderstandings; of lost and found identities performed
and deconstructed in translation and transliteration; of ideas and experiences of otherness,
sameness, difference and appropriation; the global, the local, the ‘glocal’, are researched using
a variety of visual, textual, and comparative means. During this process, focal or trifling
considerations and complications surface. Elaborate words with profound meanings that,
more often than not, remain only words devoid of content or are a gap in the personal -and
personalised- vocabulary of the ‘un-affected’ Westernised majority, are questioned and
(re)considered.
The participating artists’ reflections on the above, which materialize in the form of artworks,
contribute towards the creation of a space within a space. The artworks disrupt and interfere
with the original signal of the conceptually charged space of the Library, and instead approach,
propose or contemplate upon receptions of different frequencies. In this way, the artist’s
presence in the middle-space between artwork and viewer/receiver, is itself a conduit, a
transmitter that establishes connections which may lead to communication.
The curation of the exhibition itself, constitutes and denotes a ‘performative utterance’.1 Vicky
Pericleous’s act of assembling, selecting, arranging and transmitting through the library’s space
a collection of artworks, creates an appropriate context where the viewer, when he finds
himself surrounded by it, can in fact accomplish something: to have a productive discussion
with images and objects that resemble and express an existing concern. Hopefully, this
encounter, is going to act varyingly for viewers, for some taking the shape of a confrontation
with the unfamiliar or the impression of the familiar, for others that of a meaningful discussion,
others will remain indifferent, whereas some will decide to actively respond.
Karen Lois Whiteread, in Girl with the bling earring (2014), explores identity issues in a digital
1
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1962).

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era, through the reference of contemporary and traditional arts practice. Connections and dis-
connections between the artist, the subject and the viewer are explored. Evelyn Anastasiou’s
The tune is mentally insane (2015) plays with audience reception according to the cultural
intelligence of the viewer, in other words, the viewer’s capability to relate effectively with the
artwork across cultures. The ‘catchphrases’ EΜΠΡΟΣ, ΝΤΑΜ ΝΤΑΜ and Pay your debts!, like
other Rorschach cards, carry different meanings and trigger different associative links,
depending on the cultural background of the viewer. pick nick’s The one(s) I love (2014), chain
messages of externalised emotion, reiterated through the act of naming a beloved, create in
essence a network of social interactions, that come together in cohesion on ‘white paper’,
literally and metaphorically.2 Mohammed Keita’s investigative photography, documents
moments into the daily life of a person, an object or a scenery. His work, as in Termini (2012),
may be seen as self-contained monodramas that compose a story, and may often be described
as auto-biographical. Hourig Torossian, herself a Cypriot of Armenian origin and English art
training, informs her work with her trans-cultural background. In the portrait The Neighbour
(2015), which may also be reflected upon autobiographically, she depicts a member of her
close family environment. Past and present cultural identities and their boundaries are
explored further in The Silenced Voice (2015). Here, Torossian instigates in a discreet yet
visually outspoken manner a discussion on the deportation of Armenian intellectuals from
Constantinople in 1915 that resounds in present tense. Anna Maria Charalambous in 29.04:
blue acrylic/rain (2015) approaches the viewer by ‘letting him in’ the contents of a diary.
Originally belonging to her deceased aunt whom she never met, the diary is re-possessed by
the artist who, in an almost ritualistic act of re-typing it, she reaches out to an unknown yet
precious relative, but also through the display of this, to the viewer. In this way, the viewer
becomes a co-creator, the unfamiliar becomes familiar and personal identities are expanded.
Haris Pellapaishiotis’s Walking Narratives and Affective Cartographies explores the relationship
between people and space, using as initial devices walking and narration, questioning thus
conventional map representations. Contemporary, new media art and project design are used
as methodological tools for this collaborative ongoing investigation, bringing to the surface
new realities, perceptions and emotions that up until this point have been considered invalid,
because of their subjective attributes. Thodoris Kostidakis contributes to this exhibition with an
engaging critical text, Locating the Imaginary: Places as psychological symbols in a
contemporary fairy tale (2015). Τhe text looks closely the possible psychological meanings of
the element of place and spatial environment, as these are described in a fairy tale written by
a group of male unaccompanied minors at the Home for Hope. It also investigates what
psychological significance the imaginary places of the story have on the children. In his project
Institutionalised (work in progress) Nicolas Lambouris photographs state buildings at a time
when they are empty of people and devoid of any kind of activity. These governmental
institutions ‘stay still’ for him to perform with his camera a clinical examination of their
architectural content. Lambouris’s investigation leads to a record, a collection of studies on the
psychology of social architecture, of collective experiences, memory and manifestations of
cultural identity. Project 736ideas for a dream (2014) presents a selection from pieces made by
over 736 people across the EU in risk of social exclusion. They collectively extent their hand
and pass a message to the stakeholders and citizens, of how they would like us all to tackle
exclusion. TWO|FOUR|TWO art group’s investigative look over immigration and the subject of
2
A white paper is an authoritative report or guide informing readers in a concise manner about a complex issue
and presenting the issuing body's philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue,
solve a problem, or make a decision. See for example: Margaret Rouse, SearchSOA. Retrieved 16 March 2015.

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refugees, is communicated via the imagery of their landscape photographs, which focus on the
sea and the shoreline, as in UN_P1 (2015). The viewer’s mind drifts towards the current
international lingua franca used to communicate these images, for example “flow of refugees”,
“uprooting” and the haunting “human cargo”. A double-faced sign reading “καλώς/κακώς
ήλθατε” reminds us that the journey leads to a precarious future. The second photograph
under the same title, forms one of the two constituents of another artwork; the second
constituent being Sotiris Theocharidis’s text The rupture of meaning and the surge for the
power to consolidate, which painstakingly dissects the concerns preoccupying this exhibition.
This collaborative work creates a space where associations between text and image can
emerge anew. A third contribution by the art group is the project called Social Ride (2015),
which focuses on a process where the art object becomes an action in a series of interactive
events, allowing audience participation. They ‘perform’ their ongoing project within the
context of the exhibition. OWK zine’s visual library for words and images, employs the poetics
of space to weave an abstract story across to the viewer/reader. It seems to convincingly argue
for a fluidity in cultural interaction which is then translated into a contemporary urban ‘feel’.
One of the pieces chosen for this exhibition is an apt extract from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities,
creating a post-apocalyptic setting; a false one though since “Perinthia”, the imaginary city,
does not seem so far away from our present-day “City-Monsters”. This comes to complement
the “hollowness” described in focus in the body language of the museum guard, found in the
second piece. The third piece, which is site-specific, locates the viewer in Cyprus’s reality which
is unavoidably informed by the connotations emerging from the accompanying pieces. Last but
not least, in Nikoleta Marcovic’s letter regarding her participation in this exhibition, which acts
simultaneously as her contributing artwork, she unfolds the process towards her
understanding of the exhibition’s rationale. As the letter progresses from the exploration of
her “position and perception” as she writes, it becomes a self-critique of “us” in relation to
“them”, and an awareness that “we” create the cause and “they” experience the effect.
*UNACCOMPANIED online info: https://www.facebook.com/UNACCOMPANIEDEXHIBITION
* This text was also written in the Greek language – Available online and upon request.