a f a s i a: Christodoulos Panayiotou

Never Land . 2008

Christodoulos Panayiotou

Christodoulos Panayiotou has emerged as one of the most significant young European artists working today. Through numerous forms, his work addresses a range of issues and concerns from the legacy of theater, to the construction of national identity and history. Panayiotou frequently takes the phenomena of public functions and spectacles as a point of departure from which to explore the structures and customs that inform social experience. His process also incorporates the archives of the press as well as the regional and national agencies of his home nation of Cyprus. What results is what the artist has described as an “excavation” of Cyprus’ visual history that brings to light the “‘cults’ and ‘obsessions’ of … [this] emerging state and reveals the wider mechanisms of modern constructions of national narratives.” Despite the vast difference between the United States and Cyprus, Panayiotou’s work prompts greater recognition of how different interpretations of a collective sense of identity are dependent on the manner in which images and information are arranged and presented to us. For his presentation at CAM St. Louis — the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States — Panayiotou will present new and preexisting works that demonstrate both the range of techniques and the socio-political concerns that define his practice. New works being created for the exhibition include a multi-part series of appropriated photographs from official Cyprus archives depicting examples of civic processions, displays, and events, to evoke various ways in which people are collectively assembled and addressed in various situations, and a site-specific mural based on a theatrical backdrop from a popular music concert resembling an abstract action-painting that suggests the frequent intersections of avant-garde and popular culture in the public sphere.
CAM St. Louis