Mare Nostrum: Visions of a Mermaid

At the exhibition, under the name Mare Nostrum: Visions of a Mermaid, by Klitsa Antoniou, the viewer is not simply invited to stand in front of individual works, and to negotiate them through the detachment traditionally placed between us and art, in the gallery or museum space. Here, the viewer is asked to enter into a space–environment, where the materials, objects, images and constructions one encounters, are instances of a larger world. Our experience as viewers, in itself, which derives from the wandering through this space, is at least as important as the objects themselves, the “autonomous[?]” artworks. “Wandering”, even, is rather misleading a description of our encounter with this installation, since it alludes to the detachment of the viewer–artwork relationship. Instead, we are here invited to submerge ourselves into a seemingly strange world, which has been created by the stuff of our wishes, dreams and frustrations, both our individual, as well as our collective ones, as inhabitants of this small land, surrounded by the sea. Inhabitants of a place with a long, turbulent history, with a wavering, as much as dead-end, present, and with an uncertain future. The imaginary world, which Antoniou has installed, is offered as the way out, the desired escape, and as the construction of a new (brave?) world! The unfeasibility of such a realisation, however, is announced from the start: “mare nostrum” is how the ancient Romans named the Mediterranean Sea, at the height of their empire’s power, and of their domination of the then-known world. On the contrary, the history of this land and its destiny, the escape from which is expressed in the “visions of a mermaid”, have through the centuries been determined by others, by outside factors, thus keeping the “natives” from ever being able to call it “our land”. (Dr Antonis Danos, Mare Nostrum: Visions of a Mermaid, Diatopos Centre Catalogue, Nicosia, Cyprus)