Cyprus (Republic of)

It rests to the bones brings together Marina Xenofontos’ distinct yet interconnected approaches to artmaking, including “historical” sculpture replicating sites or events, documentary forms, and motorised machines. Xenofontos describes her practice as an “unconditional archive”: an accumulation of interrelated ideas, sites and conditions shaping the present.

From this archival field, Xenofontos has developed a replica of the ceiling of the Perroquet, a nightlife venue once emblematic of Cypriot cosmopolitanism, sealed off since the Turkish invasion of 1974. In another act of recovery, the exhibition is scored with folk songs sung by the Ayisilaou sisters – elder women in Xenofontos’ family – recorded in 2020. Mixed as new tracks, they become a poignant protest against everyday conservatism, locating alterity within tradition.

In a different vein, Xenofontos’ machine-like works foreground mechanical endurance and endless loops, seen here in an animatronic sparrow clinging to life and rotating copper cylinders. Together, kinetic and archival works suggest a latent system – mechanical yet metaphysical – that labours to keep fragile, loss-prone traces close at hand.

This anxiety around loss reflects a practice shaped by histories of rupture. Across citation and abstraction, Xenofontos’ work asks what forms might carry almost-lived experience into the future.