Marina Xenofontos: Play Life

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (MCBA), is pleased to present Marina Xenofontos’s solo exhibition Play Life, commissioned for its Project Space.

Through sculptures, found objects, writings, and films, Marina Xenofontos explores the material manifestations of memory and history. Through precise gestures, the artist lends new weight to objects that she moves, replicates, or transforms, simultaneously reconfiguring the space they inhabit. At the intersection of real and virtual space, the exhibition Play Life is articulated around the video game Twice Upon a While (2018-2025), which is shown here in its definitive form for the first time and in which visitors are active participants.

The main character in the game, named Twice, is a young girl who lives in a seemingly ordinary world but constantly finds herself transported into a dreamlike universe of choices, dead ends, loops and disorientation. The long development process of this video game, the result of which is being presented for the first time in its final form at MCBA, has evolved from animation and sculpture to an open-world RPG. There is no linear narrative or predetermined storyline. Instead, visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to replay what resembles an original scene, a childhood memory revisited ad infinitum, whose outcome—or outcomes—depend on the choices made in the present. Thus, within the game space, a multiplication of doubles emerges, as Twice becomes a reflection of the players, who define their choices in their own image.

In 2020, Xenofontos literally staged the double in a sculpture with the same title as the video game, Twice Upon a While. It was a life-size wooden mannequin, which the artist presented seated, prostrate on a mirrored table, pointing us as much to the world of fairy tales (“Once upon a time…”) as to the myth of Narcissus. More abstractly the sculptures seen in this show can also be read as forms of doubles. To the Knees (2025), an assemblage of aluminium tubes that rotate slowly, suggests the world of industry by both the materials making it up and the sound they give off. Although emptied of their original function, these physical elements bear with them a memory of their initial use whilst embracing new associations. Likewise, Found Construction Site Ladder (2025) is a found object, stripped of its function and yet implicitly referring to the question of passing from one space to another and to the body, its presence and disappearance. 

Whether static or in motion, Xenofontos’s objects are in transition. From one context to another, one function to the next. They are objects that are replicas of others, or translations that don’t strictly conform to the originals, like reflections or doubles that have come to haunt the exhibition space with the historical or personal content of their references. Through precise gestures, the artist lends those references new weight by shifting or transforming them and simultaneously reconfiguring the space they inhabit.

In the exhibition Play Life the question of the identical and the almost same, true and false, real and virtual is diffracted and refracted, not in a play of dichotomies, but in a sliding between levels of reality, between given contexts and uses.

Curated by Nicole Schweizer, Curator of contemporary art, MCBA

Biography
Marina Xenofontos (b. 1988, Cyprus) lives and works between Athens, Greece and Limassol, Cyprus. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include It Rests to the Bones, Cyprus Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale (2026); Eternal, Returns, Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2025); View From Somewhere Near, Kunstverein Hamburg (2024); Public Domain, Camden Art Centre, London (2023); and In Practice: Marina Xenofontos, SculptureCenter, New York (2023).

Xenofontos was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2018–19). She has been engaged in artist-led initiatives and collective practices in Cyprus, including co-founding Konteiner Space in Limassol (2010-13) and the collective artist space Neoterismoi Toumazou in Nicosia (2011-18).

Publication
Nicole Schweizer (ed.), Marina Xenofontos. Play Life, with contributions by Maya Tounta, and Marina Xenofontos with Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 2026.
Available at the MCBA Book and Gift shop: shop.mcba@plateforme10.ch

The video game Twice Upon a While was funded by:
Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne 
Camden Art Center, London
Hot Wheels Athens London 
The Onassis AiR/ONX Fellowship

For more information, please visit mcba.ch