Kynthia Livaniou - For A Helen

50-1 Gallery is pleased to present Kynthia Livaniou’s first solo exhibition in Cyprus, entitled For A Helen.

Kynthia Livaniou’s For A Helen, swerves us around in metaphor and memory, shadows and sensual passings, echoing and enveloping imaginings. Indulging in what might look like a sort of celebrity standing, and celebrating one’s own feminine identity creates, here, a visual engagement with a new female form, which escapes a prolonged history of mis-representation through the male gaze.

Initially, a presentation of these images came as a live piece of a performer, naked and, at the same time, adorned in projections of other female figures, whose images the artist had borrowed from Federico Fellini’s City of Women. She then moved on to spread the aura of the performance from a real time experience to a documentation of the images captured, like a memorabilia of events, creating a catalogue publication of limited editions.

In this solo exhibition, Kynthia Livaniou takes off by deviating from where she first began. Sensibly selecting moments of what she senses to be a “female” experience, in this project, she offers us a kind of celebration of this linkage of women’s bearing and story passing. In a snapshot of women’s history and images, both self-reflected and socially constructed, the artist loosens assumption and censorship by offering tiers of allusions from which, rather than construct a “female” identity, she subjects women to an embodying of themselves, which absolves them from suppressing a daring display of their very impact.

Large format and small, the artist creates images from these photographs by a unique process of layering material. The photographs exhibited have not been manipulated in any way. Some passing shots taken during the initial performance are brought together by a sheeting activity with still moments drawn from the projected scenes of City of Women. Kynthia Livaniou frames the female body in a way that alludes to a heavy history of women’s bodies being objectified. This male envisaging of the female being viewed in contradiction, perhaps, with a cross-referencing of the female experience of effectively viewing herself, manifests in the actualized idea of layering diverse imageries. The artist departs from a kind of frightening mayhem of phantom forms to conjure up a re-emerging library of female forms

Maria Petrides, Independent Writer

Opening: 28 September 2012, 8pm
Exhibition dates: 29 September 2012 – 27 October 2012

Opening Hours
Tuesday – Friday: 11:00 – 13:00 & 16:00 - 20:00
Saturday: 11:00 – 14:00