UNCOVERED
Nicosia International Airport
2010–2013
Nicosia, CYPRUS
23 September–23 October 2011
Opening:
23 September
Venue:
Ledra Street/Lockmaci Buffer zone
Hours:
10am–8pm, daily (except Mondays)
Panel Discussion: 24 September
Venue:
Home for Cooperation Buffer zone
Time:
2.30–7.30pm
Curators : Pavlina Paraskevaidou and Basak Senova
Project Co-Ordinators: Ozgul Ezgin and Argyro Toumazou
Based on an idea by artist Vicky Pericleous.
THE PROJECT: UNCOVERED is a three-year research-based art project, divided into two phases that explores the closed Nicosia International Airport. The first phase is launched in September with an exhibition, a panel discussion and accompanying publications.
The title of the project is a word-play UN+COVERED reflecting on the role and presence of the UN at the airport since the latter was declared a United Nations Protected Area following the hostilities on the island in the summer of 1974, resulting in the de-facto division of the island and the creation of a buffer zone. The United Nations continues to facilitate Peace negotiations between the two sides. The project aims to explore notions of memory, commons and control mechanisms, as these arise out of the status of a closed-off airport in a space of conflict.
Lying abandoned inside the buffer zone and off limits to the local communities, the Nicosia Airport represents a spatial order generated by 37 years of UN control in the context of a protracted conflict between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities. The once-bustling airport reflected the hope of a newly independent country in the wake of post-colonialism. The novelty of its architecture, with its much-hailed new terminal has acquired a rich patina of forgetting and now stands as a monument to a failed modernism while it remains in a state of suspended animation.
UNCOVERED explores how this space, frozen in time and space, exposes the operational and organizational logics of control that have evolved on the island and asks questions that move beyond the ubiquitous mnemonic to pain in order to ultimately understand and reclaim the island’s “commons.”
Artists:Özge Ertanın and Oya Silbery, Görkem Müniroglu, Vicky Pericleous, Erhan Oze, Andreas Savva, Zehra Sonia and Gur Genc, Socratis Socratous, Demetris Taliotis, Constantinos Taliotis and Orestis Lambrou.
Panelists: Niyazi Gizilyurek, Marina Griznic, Lamia Joreige, Jack Persekian and Socrates Stratis.
The panel discussion will be followed by a film screening of Anton Vidokle’s New York Conversations (2011).
The exhibition is presented under the auspices of the United Nations Good Offices in Cyprus and the support of UNDP, Cyprus.
The printing of the book and all accompanying publications is sponsored by the Phileleftheros Group.
The panel and book is in part supported by the Open Society Foundation.
The panel is hosted by the Home for Cooperation
Project Partners:
EMAA
Pharos Arts Foundation
Anadolu Kultur
