Press Release |  November 2025

“Of Monumental” - An interdisciplinary exhibition on Cyprus' public art monuments

GR | TR

Opening: Saturday, 29th of November 2025, 19:30, Nicosia Masterplan Hall (Ledras Street Crossing)
Duration: 29/11-20/12/2025, Open on Mondays &  Thursdays 10:00-17:00, or via appointment by email at contact@visual-voices.org

“Of Monumental” is an ongoing intercommunal artistic and research initiative that opens a critical space for reflection and active engagement with the public art landscape of Cyprus. It interrogates the relational nature of public art monuments, proposing their expanded understanding, not as static commemorations of the past, but as participatory and socially embedded objects that articulate shifting meanings within the public sphere.

Conceived by visual artist PASHIAS, and grounded in his previous work, “Of Monumental” is implemented by the intercommunal cultural non-profit organisation Visual Voices, in collaboration with architect and academic Dr. Dimitris Venizelos, researcher Selin Genç, audiovisual artist Rahme Veziroğlu, and curator Melina Philippou. It is funded by the Deputy Ministry of Culture under the program Politismos II, 2025.

The project’s first public presentation takes form as a collective installation, opening on Saturday, 29th of November, 19:30, at the Nicosia Masterplan Hall, Nicosia Buffer Zone (Ledras Street - Lokmaci Crossing), examining 11 public art sculptures of cultural significance across the divide: “Birth” by Maria Kyprianou (2000, Limassol), “Big Potato” (2021, Xylophagou), “Clepsydra” by Theodoulos Gregoriou (2009, Larnaca), “Democracy Sculpture” by Zehra Şonya (2019, Nicosia), “Horses” by the Near East University Sculpture Workshop (2021, Nicosia/Lefkoşa), “Jaffa Orange” by Sevcan Çerkez (2018, Lefke/Lefka), “Lying Down” by Naz Atun (2021, Nicosia/Lefkoşa), “Miners Strike Monument” (2018, Lefke/Lefka), “The Liberty Monument” by Ioannis Notaras (1973, Nicosia), “The Poet” by Kostas Varotsos (1983, Nicosia) and “Rainbow” by Nikos Kouroushis (1976, Nicosia) that was taken down later on.

This selection reflects an inquiry into the plural functions of public art in Cyprus, from formal commemorations of historical events to vernacular symbols of livelihood and contemporary gestures of abstraction or critique. Observed together, they reveal Cyprus’ public art landscape as a terrain of negotiation between institutional authority and community agency.

The exhibition unfolds as a collective installation, anchored by a series of public performance interventions translated into film works by PASHIAS, introducing the contemporary body in its corporeal, vulnerable, powerful, queer, fluid, and subversive form at each monumental site. These are framed by the situationist explorations of Rahme Veziroğlu and interwoven with fragments from the monuments’ biographies, through archival materials and newly conducted interviews with the following contributors: Dr Nadia Anaxagora, Naz Atun, Sevcan Çerkez, Theodoulos Gregoriou, Dakis Joannou, Maria Kyprianou, Nikos Kouroussis, Giorgos Tasou, Kostas Varotsos, Zehra Şonya, Dr. Ali Efdal Özçul and Dr Yiannis Toumazis.

Together, these works expose the mechanisms through which monuments acquire meaning, and how that meaning shifts through time and collective encounters.“Of Monumental” seeks to provoke renewed interactions with public legacy, opening up a critical dialogue on city space as a site of civic exchange, reformulating narratives of identity, memory, and authorship, inviting us to learn from existing histories, while speculating on future ones.

The accompanying research study of the “Of Monumental” pilot, titled “Conversation with a sculptor / Conversation with a sculpture”, will be released in January 2026, in collaboration with the Visual Artists & Art Theorists Association – phytorio for their series of events “Minor Gestures Take Root in the Cracks”.

Project Statement | April 2025

Of Monumental is an interdisciplinary bi-communal project foregrounded in previous work of visual artist PASHIAS, led by intercommunal cultural NGO Visual Voices and co-funded by the Deputy Ministry of Culture. By exploring the commemorative public art landscape of Cyprus through performance art, photography and multimodal ethnography, Of Monumental results in a layered exhibition to take place in December 2025.

The project explores the evolving role of public art monuments in shaping collective memory and negotiating contested narratives. We approach them as relational entities within broader historical, social and political frameworks, shaping and being shaped by diverse subjectivities, discourses and imaginaries.

We are exploring two key questions: How do public art monuments embody and negotiate shifting narratives of identity, memory and reconciliation in Cyprus? Additionally, in what ways can aesthetic and performative interventions reveal or subvert the contested meanings and mediated representations of public spaces and materialities, thereby reconfiguring collective memories and redefining the commons?

Acknowledging the ‘agency’ and ‘biography’ of monuments as dynamic artifacts, Of Monumental views them as open circuits for new relationships and narratives accrued over time.

Building a fresh layer of sediment on this history, the project engages with the semantically dynamic nature of public art monuments through artistic interventions and systemic research on 10 diverse public art monuments across the divide, including “The Poet” (1983) by Costas Varotsos in Nicosia, the 1948 Miners Strike monument (2018) in Lefke and “The Big Potato” (2021) in Xylophagou.

Internationally renowned visual artist PASHIAS, with a long-standing practice on public art interventions, explores how the human body and the medium of moving image can offer renewed and embodied perspectives on these historical markers, as experienced in space and time. Simultaneously, the research team led by Dr Dimitris Venizelos, architect and human geographer with research interests on the politics of space and its representations, and Rahme Veziroglu, audiovisual artist, researcher and filmmaker with a body of work rooted in activism, human rights and reconciliation, studies the histories of these public artifacts by assembling alternative and unexpected narratives through stakeholder interviews, archival research and media documentation. A final exhibition curated by Melina Philippou showcases a visual portfolio of research on the 10 public art monuments, alongside their artistic reconfigurations, illuminating these parallel processes of history-making.

The research and artistic methodology developed in Of Monumental is a scalable framework for future iterations, aspiring for an expanded exploration of Cyprus' public art landscape.

Of Monumental is co-funded by “Politismos II”, 2025 of the Deputy Ministry of Culture, Republic of Cyprus.

Project team

Visual Voices: Melina Philippou (Architect-Urbanist & Artistic Director), Alden Jacobs (Co-founder & Director of Program Development), Selin Genc (Art Historian & Cultural Anthropologist, Artistic & Community Manager)

In collaboration with: Dr. Dimitris Venizelos (Senior Lecturer, Department of Architecture & Landscape, Kingston University - UK), PASHIAS (Visual Artist, Curator), Rahme Veziroglu (Audiovisual Artist)