August sorrow

 

Project Introduction:  Kallinikou presents works from his ongoing exploration of the area around Akrotiri, a British overseas territory with a military base in Cyprus, which coincides with a unique biosphere landscape of supra-regional importance as it is the military base for observing developments in the Middle East. 

 

Radar station focuses both on the RAF (Royal Air Force) Troodos station, one of the main British overseas military installations—in the Troodos mountains since 1878, and on the Starbrook wide-field telescope of the BNSC (British National Space Centre), situated on the same spot since 2016. 

 

These images are juxtaposed with new works produced during a one-month residency in the Algarve region of southern Portugal, where the trade of enslaved African people took root in Europe.

 

August sorrow presents speculative scenarios, through which the intersections between territorial and ideological notions relating to 'landscape' - such as space / place and time / history - are explored.

 

August sorrow was created during a joint artist residency between February - March 2020 at the LAC studios with Akeelah Bertram (UK), Anna Carreras (Spain) and Stelios Kallinikou (Cyprus). LAC, a partner on the CONTESTED DESIRES programme, is based in Lagos, a town in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. The residency followed and responded to ‘Heritage vs. Culture’, the first capacity building workshop of the CONTESTED DESIRES programme that reflected on the colonial legacies of Lagos and how we, as artists, activists and citizens engage with the past that has created the world in which we live.

 

Biography: Stelios Kallinikou approaches photography as a spatially performative act. An archaeologist by training, he is interested in unearthing narratives of spaces which lie beyond words. He presents us with sequences of imagery, flowing into interlaced dialogues, whilst exploring the nexus between the narrative limitations of photography and consciousness. His images appear mythological and archaeologically proto-human, connecting something primordial to the present by narrativizing the body’s connection with the earth. His worlds are constructed at an introspective, meditative pace, and then act as speculative scenarios. His work has been presented in solo and group shows internationally and he is co-founder of Thkio Ppalies Artist-led Project Space, based in Nicosia, Cyprus.

​

View 'August sorrow'  here