1980–present
Haris Epaminonda
Haris Epaminonda was born in Nicosia in 1980, studied in London and now lives and works in Berlin. She builds collages, films and spatial installations from found photographs, book pages and objects, and calls many of her works simply “Volume” with a number. In 2007 she represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale together with Mustafa Hulusi, and in 2019 she won the Silver Lion there.
Biography
Haris Epaminonda’s works are most often titled “Volume” followed by a Roman numeral: “VOL. VI” was shown at Tate Modern in 2010, “VOL. XXII” at the Aspen Art Museum in 2017, “VOL. XXIIV” in Vienna in 2018. Writers on her work explain the numbers as a wish to leave the viewer more freedom and to make feeling matter more than analysis. Each new work grows out of the previous one, so the boundaries between volumes are blurred.
She was born in Nicosia in 1980. She studied in London, at the Royal College of Art and at Kingston University, from which she graduated in 2003, and then returned to Cyprus. In 2001 she met the artist Daniel Gustav Cramer. Since 2007 they have run a joint project, “The Infinite Library”: from selected illustrations and photographs they assemble collages and books, giving the found images a new context. By some accounts the basis of the project, “The Beehive”, appeared as early as 2005; the collection numbers more than fifty objects. Together they showed work in Lisbon and in Kassel in 2012, and they made the exhibitions “Late Autumn” (Berlin, 2010) and “Early Summer” (Lisbon, 2013) as a pair.
Epaminonda began by reworking photographic illustrations from French magazines and books of the 1940s to 1960s. From 2005 she made black-and-white collages with figures and architecture, and from 2007 she moved to colour images. Some compositions come from photographing found material anew, as in the “Polaroid” series of 2008–2009.
In 2007 she represented Cyprus, together with Mustafa Hulusi, at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Their exhibition “Old Earth, No More Lies, I See You…” took place at the Palazzo Malipiero; in the same year there was an exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and a show, “Yama, As Long As It’s Dark…”, at the Marmara Hotel in Istanbul. After that the exhibitions come thick and fast. Volumes I–III were shown in 2009 by the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö, and volumes IIII, V and VI were at the Berlin gallery Circus in 2008. In 2011 “Projects 96” was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in the same year there was an exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main. In 2013 her work was shown by Modern Art Oxford, a Kunsthaus in Zurich and the Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia. In 2014 “Chapter IV” opened at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, in 2015 “VOL. XVI” was shown at Le Plateau in Paris, and in 2016 “The Infinite Library” at the Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art in Seville. Her work has been included in Documenta 13, Manifesta, the Berlin Biennale, and the biennials in São Paulo, Sharjah and Athens.
At the 2019 Venice Biennale Epaminonda won the Silver Lion for a promising young participant in the central exhibition. She is represented by the Sylvia Kouvali gallery in London and Athens and by Galleria Massimo Minini in Brescia.
Today she concentrates on collages and layered spatial installations that combine paintings, films, photographs, sculptures and found objects. She lives in Berlin.
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