Walking Narratives and Affective Mapping

Haris Pellapaisiotis - Walking Narratives and Affective Mapping

Opening: Friday, 22 February 2019 | 18:30

Screening | 19:00
duration: 90 minutes

Exhibition duration: 23 February - 28 March 2019

The art project Walking Narratives and Affective Mapping explores the city of Nicosia as a fluid space that engenders individual narrative connections. These emerge through lived experiences and are then developed into narrativized artefacts through a process of engagement, dialogue and collaboration between invited contributors and Haris Pellapaisiotis. The artist responds to each walking journey using a methodology that comprises situatedness and embodiment as well as relational, dialogic and collaborative practice. Video combined with the written and spoken word, photography, digital animation and sound are the media used by the artist to craft new narrativized artefacts that redefine the language typically used to describe Nicosia. These assemblages open up novel configurations that allow us to step away from readily available ways of thinking and writing the city, and together form radical archival propositions that contradict the vocabulary of unitary ideologies of territory. The Nicosia that is discovered together this way offers a fractured, poetic reading of the city.

For this prototype, the artist has chosen contributors for whom Nicosia is – or has been – home, but who, like himself, have spent substantial time away from Cyprus. He refers to Murat Erdal Ilican, Ruth Keshishian, Alexandra Manglis and Stephanos Stephanides. Others, such as Frank Chouraqui, Diana Wood Conroy, Susan Kozel, Peter Loizos, Yael Navaro, and Pelin Tan are not natives to Cyprus but are connected to the country professionally or through kinship, and during their time in Cyprus have made the place a part of their work. The semi-outsider status of these contributors does not mean that their relationship to Nicosia is lacking in some way. In fact, the artist suggests the opposite – their connection to the island introduces to our reading of the city a specific tension of consciousness that arises from a sense of nearness / distance that provokes a constant review of the ‘we’ sense of practice of culture - in other words, the collective ritualizing, theorizing and representation of Nicosia. This, the artist suggests, opens the possibility for different modes of visibility of the city.

Haris Pellapaisiotis is an artist/photographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Graphic Communication and Multimedia at the University of Nicosia. He lectures on photography, visual art and cultural studies. Prior to his re-settlement in Cyprus in 2001 he lived in London where he lectured on photography at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. He holds a B.A. in Fine Art, Post-graduate in Media and Communication (photography) and is currently completing his PhD art research. He is the founding director of the Artalk seminars (Nicosia), which he co-organised and presented between 2004-2009. His work has been shown at various international venues, including The Photographer’s Gallery, London, The Museum of London and Witte de With, Rotterdam. Recent publications include the essay The Art of the Buffer Zone, 2014, I.B.Tauris. He is currently working on a major new collaborative art research project that will result in a series of art products including a mixed media and interdisciplinary exhibition, a publication and a series of performance seminars.

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