PROJECTS

PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE

01-03/11.2

screening event

CYPHER’s inaugural event, PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE is the first installment of an ongoing film program on this subject jointly curated by Sofia Kouloukouri (RE-SISTERS) and Alexios Seilopoulos (APROPOS). The program emerged as an inquiry on the artistic practices of various subcultures and on their modes of filmmaking.

Sharing a background in cinema, artist and art historian Kouloukouri’s research centers on female artists and representations of sexwork, while Seilopoulos’s curation of talks (Highly Opinionated, Barbican, London) centers on queer resistance.

The first instalment of Pleasure & Disobedience focuses on shorts, features and art films from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s by female and queer directors. What links the two is the politics of pleasure and disobedience as well as tons of low budget DIY filming.

Liberty’s Booty, Variety, Born in Flames and Audience all made within 3 years of each other are exemplary pieces of New York’s No Wave film scene in the early 80’s when women filmakers such as Lizzie Borden, Bette Gordon, Vivienne Dick, Barbara Hammer as well as artists Nan Goldin and writer Kathy Acker collaborated in the making of low budget films portraying a no filter mix of their lives in the city from aimless wandering, to sex work, lesbian regroupings and feminist revolt.

Around the same time from New York to London and Berlin we observe the progressive emergence of queer cinema with filmmakers such as Rosa von Praunheim, Isaac Julien, Peter Strickland, Lawrence Elbert and others. Although I don’t know, City of Lost Souls and Days of Pentecost are each almost a decade apart, these rebellious, brutally honest queer gems employ popular formats from documentary to exploitation film and above all musical, to depict a time of sexual liberation, experimentation and rejection of the heteronomrative lifestyle.

CYANEAN

14.11-05.12

SOLO SHOW OF ATHINA PAVLOU BENAZI

CURATED BY ISAVELLA KLADAKI

Athina Pavlou Benazi creates CYANEAN, an installation/environment within the premises of CYPHER. CYANEAN is the environment that unfolds and spreads from the upper level to the basement, an

environment composed of and completed by three distinct works that stand both as independent objects and as points along a potential path. The emphasis is placed on the concept of initiation

through a passage, from the outside to the inside and from the top to the bottom, from one place to another, from one internal state to another. From the Cyanean Rocks installation to the crossing and

then to the hideaway, staying focused to the axes that run through her research and practice and drawing from the natural landscape, Pavlou-Benazi creates a multi-sensory environment that invites

the viewer to become part of it and interact with it, playing between opposing concepts, such as the element of water, the sea and the rock, the intensity or stability of flow, and the suffocation of

stagnation as well as dealing with the ambivalence towards the absence of boundaries. The concept of the trace through movement is studied within the space, a space that is fluid and maritime - with

all the possible connotations - under the lens of time, a time that at certain moments runs relentlessly

fast and at others stops and ceases to exist.

COLLABORATIVE PAINTING

11.10.24

Cypher is opened its doors on October 12th , organising an open art

studio. In a somehow experimental way, it invited guests to link up and connect with each other, while connecting with their own creativity. Deeply believing that every single human is creative and shifting the focus from an object-oriented artistic practice, to a process oriented one, it invites guests to experiment with materials

while working collectively in a single art piece.

Materials were provided freely and for the next 10 days this ongoing artwork was in display at the space of Cypher, prone to be transformed by its visitors.

This socially constructed, artistic situation, aimed to be the beginning of an ongoing project where: visitors, are welcomed to explore their own creativity, leave their gesture, participate, and interact with one another, becoming key stones to the creation of an art piece, while enjoying this shared process. Liberating oneself from the notions of failure, error, or damage, giving space to aesthetic impulse driven by materials. A symbolic transitional space is being built, to contemplate on how to shape collective experience together, deepening our understanding on how systems work and how to network between different groups and individuals, through creating an artwork that can be perceived as an open system which can be transformed and developed overtime.

Individual and collective stories could be contained and hold by this artwork, creating a non-linear narrative of personal perspectives as well as the bigger systems they exist within. Hopefully, reconfiguring social interactions within art spaces as

well as the communities they are part of.

duo show of Marilena Georgantzi and Nagore Chivite

11.12-05.01

The exhibition ALL OUR HORSES, derives from Marilena Georgantzi's text of the same name and is the material expression of her conversation with Nagore Chivite within the gallery’s space. Watercolours on paper, prints on paper, prints on textiles and sculptural forms revolve around words, opening slits and passages through space, stitches that map mnemonic traces, psychic paths and imprints around the absence of Horses, interrogating the absence of our animal nature. Where did the instinct go? They open windows in empty spaces, lest they see the horses pass by. They play with the hero motif in fairy tales, the journey of searching, of adventure and doubt, of reconciliation with Absence, and loss, of the safety of what is familiar. The acceptance of a world being torn down to build a new one. They leave marks, traces small in the corners of space, weaving paths across uncharted expanses of material, inviting us to search for the footprints of horse hooves in muddy valleys until we connect with the wild femininities of our cellular memory, searching within ourselves for pieces forcibly detached or silenced, patiently waiting to be unearthed and made ours again. Bits and pieces, life-giving parts, life-giving limbs that might be frightening, molds of what is called to reveal itself to us, fragmented horses, their parts detached from the whole that - always - exists and waits to be reconstituted. Personal histories and references, intertwined with the mythological and the archetypal, inviting us to unravel them, exploring and tracing our own path, negotiating our relationship both conceptually and materially with them.

Isavella Kladaki

all our horses

" Aaaaa,aa"

17.01- 28.02.25

Eleni Tomadaki's solo show

curated by Ioanna Gerakidi

CYPHER presents the first solo exhibition of Eleni Tomadaki, titled “Aaaaa,aa”, curated by Ioanna Gerakidi. Rooted in the primitive and instinctive yet tender gesture of the stroke, Tomadaki’s new body of work oscillates between chaos and hesitation, destruction and creation. Through her recent patterns—once figurative, currently broken, faded or willfully fainted—the artist questions the boundaries of form and existence. By occupying a space which lingers over the real and the speculative, the haptic and the dreamy, the exhibition “Aaaaa,aa” interprets breath as an alternative vocabulary and order as something ever-changing, inviting the audience to explore their own meanings, spiralities, and freedoms.

A few weeks back, in a note she wrote as a response to her practice or praxes on and nearby painting, Eleni Tomadaki says that: “Each stroke signifies decisions which reply to questions. Questions concerning the medium, the limits of the medium, the limits of the self.” I read it and I remember I was left thinking: Why a stroke? Who’s historically named this often rough and abrupt and unmeasured gesture a stroke? How can a movement almost instinctive or primitive be seen or uttered as something as tender and motherly and loving?

Yet, in this new body of work bringing together a series of paintings and other works, words and sounds, Tomadaki enacts the essence of the “stroke”. There’s something in her recent patterns, once figurative, currently broken, faded or willfully fainted, sharpened and darkened and paused, that was born through and by touch.

And through this exact touch, its pains or pleasures or both, she navigates us through her questions on limit. Her touch traces the idea or the connotations of that feared and fearless line in multiple and vexed ways. Her works speaks of hesitation and chaos, they grasp the gasp, follow the chasm, intensify when shielded, show and shine when safe. The limits of her medium extend following the rhythms of her self. The bodily gesture turns into a promise, a fractured yet performative engagement with a series of subversions and other schemes seemingly contradictory.

In this new body of work presented in her solo show “Aaaaa,aa”, Tomadaki creates a world, an omniverse where she can compulsively destroy what was once delimited or bounded, only to let it grow. And within such a process, she resists time and exceeds space; she fails the image as a whole, obeys to the impositions of her ruins. She gets lost and stubbornly occupies this space in between the real and the speculative, the haptic and the dreamy.

Vernaculars and screams and whispers, urban and other landscapes, diaristic elements, spirits, animals and woods and wounds, birds and their voices in high-pitched volumes, they all co-exist in her work. Nothing’s too frivolous to be excluded, nothing’s too precious to be praised either. Relics and dirty wipes, pinks and blacks, spiderwebs or the spectrum of light, the tensions between them all, non-defined and peripheral, form what will be brought to the center of attention.

In “Aaaaa,aa” breaths are intrinsic parts of an alternative vocabulary, supporting mechanisms are vessels for resisting the body’s restraints and images escape the structure of an internal or external depiction, allowing us audiences to become with our meanings, spiralities, freedoms. And over this constantly alternating or fighting states between the tamed and the disruptive, things find another order, a limitless, unending point where the lyrical exist only through the breaks of cacophony.

Ioanna Gerakidi