Christodoulos Panayiotou

Biography

In 2015, at the Venice Biennale, three wall mosaics made of ancient tesserae hung in the Cyprus Pavilion. The artist had borrowed the small fragments from the Archaeological Museum in Nicosia, and when the exhibition closed, the museum’s conservators took the works apart again into a heap of unidentified cubes.

Panayiotou was born in 1978 in Limassol.

He did not begin with painting. He trained first in the performing arts and dance in Lyon, then in London, and afterwards studied anthropology or, according to other accounts, also history and theatre anthropology. In 2003 he left the stage for the visual arts. A habit of movement and ethnographic observation stayed in his work, and many pieces are built as an action played out in the gallery.

Archives are the basis of his practice. The slide projections “Wonder Land” (2008), “Never Land” (2008) and “I Land” (2010) came together as a trilogy after long work in Cypriot collections. The first consists of eighty photographs of the Limassol carnival from 1975 to 2008, taken from the municipal archive; in many of them local people are dressed as Disney characters. The second, a three-channel projection, is assembled from photographs in Phileleftheros, the island’s largest daily newspaper, from the 1990s, when the country was preparing to join the European Union. In the third he works through photographs taken by the Press and Information Office in Nicosia, a government department that supplies official material to the media, during the seventeen years of the presidency of Archbishop Makarios III. Among the official portraits Panayiotou found chance shots taken by photographers in passing, and by setting them side by side he drew out a parallel story that accompanies the official version and argues with it. To my mind this is the clearest example of how he reads an archive: not out of nostalgia but to see what ideology assembled it.

Money and value are a subject of their own. For his series of pulp paintings he replaced ordinary paper pulp with pulp from shredded banknotes taken out of circulation: euros, misprinted US dollars, old Deutschmarks. Nothing of the notes remains but their pigment. The fountains of “The Price of Copper” are made from a raw sheet of copper from the Skouriotissa mines; the title is borrowed from Bertolt Brecht’s parable “Der Messingkauf” (“Buying Brass”). The sheet is a fountain, and a sculpture, only while the water runs.

Since 2012, beginning with the exhibition “Tenuto” at the Rodeo gallery in Istanbul, he has shown gold-gilded monochrome “icons”. An iconographer paints them on his commission using traditional Byzantine techniques, and of the image only the gold ground is left. From 2019 the series has taken in the silversmithing and gilding used to make revetments, the metal covers of religious icons. In the series “Mauvaises herbes” he turned into mosaic the weeds growing on the backfilled excavations of ancient Kourion, at full scale and in the same technique as the antiquities hidden beneath them. For his exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay in 2019 he worked with the museum’s conservators, collecting the cotton wool used to remove varnish and grime from paintings in the collection, and used the residue to cover new canvases.

He has made folded theatrical backdrops since 2007. One of them, “The Parting Discourse”, showing a horizon, slowly descended on the stage in Venice, collapsed on itself and was carried away, to be exhibited afterwards folded. Alongside this, since the 2010s, he has been giving the lecture-performance “Dying on Stage”: every year on his birthday he adds a new chapter, and the material now runs to more than twenty hours.

Exhibitions: Kunsthalle Zürich (2010), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig (2011), documenta 13 in Kassel (2012), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2013), Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City (2017), Camden Arts Centre in London and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (2019), LUMA Arles from 2023. In 2018 he founded The Island Club, a non-profit exhibition space in Limassol. Prizes: the DESTE Prize (2005), the Future of Europe Prize from the Leipzig museum (2011), the Nemitsas Prize (2015). He lives and works in Limassol and Paris.