Marianna Christofides
Here let me stand
14 March–19 April 2014
Campagne Première Berlin
Chausseestrasse 116
D-10115 Berlin
Germany
Marianna Christofides is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker who works primarily with installations, film and text. In her artistic practice she investigates ‘documented realities’ by means of transformational processes across disciplines. Images are considered as visual documents of stories and places that have the potential to be reconfigured. These narratives are also rooted in an engagement of the artist and her biography with the actual places.
Christofides’ work is a journeying that laterally dissects disciplines, space and time. Such routes take the form of sequences of images, words and objects that unfold in spatial installations to reveal at times alienated narrations where past and present seem to coincide.
Among a selection of photographic and print work, Marianna Christofides’ first solo show at Campagne Première encompasses two major installations by the artist. Timecode für Erzählstimme (Timecode for a Narrative Voice), 2013, a three-part installation, addresses the elusiveness and merely suggestive feasibility of memory.
blueville (2013) consists of a wasps’ nest which the artist found sitting on a beam in the roof timbering of her uncle’s house in a mountain village in Cyprus. She transferred it to a pristine white marble from Attica, letting the nest wander from space to space, lit and covered. Displacement, shift, asynchrony and a poetic transfer in different mediums and modes of production are constitutive parts of Christofides’ approach. Such leaps in temporal and spatial linearity enable a multi-layered cultural consciousness that leads to a new topography, an image-space made out of envisioned and factual elements.
The title work Here let me stand (2013, HD video with sound, 4:3, 29:42 minutes loop) refers to a bulky volume from 1881 in the National Archives in London titled “Cyprus Antiquities – Excavated by Major Alexander Palma di Cesnola,” containing images of the findings of piercing precision and resolution.
Looking at these photographs today, which bear witness to a subjective, arbitrary classification, both chronologically and topographically, one becomes aware of the fiction that is imprinted on the photographic paper and which by now has gained its own historicity. In the video Here let me stand these static images are unified in a slow, continuous, unceasing take. Collage and montage meet indiscernibly in a work that aims at a poetic transfer of a fictitious assembly.
Marianna Christofides, b. 1980 in Nicosia (Cyprus), lives and works in Cologne. In 2011 she co-represented Cyprus at the 54th Venice Biennale. She has received numerous grants and scholarships, among them the working grant of Stiftung Kunstfonds, Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Imhoff Stiftung, and was shortlisted for the 8th Deste Prize Athens. She is currently scholarship holder of Villa Aurora, Los Angeles. Her work has recently been shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Gasworks, London; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Museum for Photography, Braunschweig; Museum for Contemporary Art Siegen; Kunsthalle Bremen and BOZAR Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.
For more information, please contact the gallery at gallery [at] campagne-premiere.com.
