Heartlands

Klitsa Antoniou’s work provides a challenge to […] utopic ideas. Her juxtaposition of fragments from the Golden Lane Estate with images from the line that divides Nicosia brings to mind Corbusier’s juxtaposition in his book of images from the Parthenon, industrial silos, production lines, airplanes and cars. However, there is a major difference in Antoniou’s work: Her ‘heartlands’ although they borrow the primary colours, so favoured by modernist painters and architects, as well as black and grey, explode the idea of space in order to produce challenging spatial distortions in two dimensions that invite us to re-think our concepts of space and time. Instead of the frozen time of utopia, Antoniou offers to the viewer a past and a present that co-exist and function in simultaneity. The past is in a state of virtuality and invites us to place ourselves in it if we are to have recollections and memory images. To remember, wrote the philosopher Henry Bergson (Matter and Memory, 1896) is to throw oneself into the past, to seek events where they took place and to refuse to conceptualise space as a passive repository whose form is given by its content and instead, to see it as a moment of becoming and a passage from one space to another. Antoniou re-thinks architecture and its immobility in terms of surfaces, flatness, dynamism and movement in order to create embodied assemblages reminiscent of the pioneering Dadaist photomontages of Hannah Hoch in 1920s Berlin. However, Antoniou’s polymorphic montages depart from the confines of the present in order to explode like little bombs in our faces and scatter the many images into different planes creating thus embodied intensities that take us away from eternal truths, so much favoured within utopias and the Cypriot reality in particular.
(Gabriel Koureas, Modernist Transgressions: Memory, Place and Identity, Tall Tales Lovely Landmarks, Exhibit Gallery)