Klitsa Antoniou: an artistic pick

 Hello to all the lovely creatures out there!

Today I'd like to introduce you to a contemporary artist with a special take in creating art installations. Her name is Klitsa Antoniou and she is a cyprian multidisciplinary artist. Her artworks are defined by a recurrent range of philosophical themes like memory, the process of recollection and the awareness of an ever returning practice of allowing the present to formulate and re-adress the past.

Klitsa Antoniou (2020):"I am so glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love". Exhibition at Park Hotel, Cyprus.

Some facts about Klitsa Antoniou: she was born in Nicosia, Cyprus where she currenly lives and works as a professor of Fine Arts in the Fine Arts Department of the Cyprus University of Technology. She studied at Wimbledon School of Art and Saint Martin's School of Art and Design in London. Since 2014 she holds a PhD in Theory and Philosophy of Art from the Cyprus University of Technology.

Antoniou uses a wide variety of different mediums to express her art through, depending each time on what she wants to express. Particularly, dealing with issues of trauma, loss and dislocation, her artworks are represented with as she likes to call "A Lyotardian metaphor of impossibility - where no object will ever be right or appropriate to the historic trauma that it takes as its grounding subject". 

Klitsa Antoniou (2017): "Ars Excependi" - Urban Installation

Her works in general can be viewed as yet-to-be-completed, resisting the intention of wholeness, and rather sustain it as a desire. As an artist, she has exhibited in major museums, galleries and art institutions worldwide. Her work has been exhibited in Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; Palais de Rhin/Drac Alsace, Strasbourg; Sandstrom Andersson Gallery, Sweden; Exhibit Gallery, London; Antrepo, Instabul; Pulchri Studio, Hague; Macedonian Museum, Thessaloniki; Wonderland Lotte Square Quanzhou, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo;  The Museum of the Arts of the 20th and 21st Century, St. Petesburg, Russia, Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Greece and more.

Klitsa Antoniou (2012): "Mirror Space, Travel Pass" - Site Specific Installationat the Larnaca Airport.

As she likes to say about her work: "My art is a realm that opens up the world, unfolding it towards that which we are unable to represent. The cause of the violence, the fragmented (or fractured) sensory experience, and the unpredictable and persistent temporality of trauma and memory in my art, are invisible but present-they constitute a force which makes its presence known. I attempt the impossible in striving to bear witness to the loss and suffering experienced not only through a past loss, but rather to something more general and devastating: namely to the loss inscribed in the movement of temporality itself. There is an intense awareness of a traumatic past, but also an expectant openness, a void waiting to be filled by worlds yet to be born, worlds that could be equally doubtful, painful, insecure and uncertain".

I came across Antoniou while researching for something completely different, I saw a photo of one of her artowrks that I found quite peculiar: simple yet enough to express everything she wanted to say and it stuck with me. Then the next days I started checking out the rest of her work. She dives in some very hard and heavy themes of loss and trauma in our lives, not afraid of expressing exaclty this fear, this emptiness and unequivocal feeling of numbness and yet-to-be-completed. Interracting with her artwork feels more like walking into an empty space that it is however, filled with so much more that it might combust right here and there. I believe it is quite unique to be able to express the feeling of nothing and everything altogether at the same time and Klitsa Antoniou is able to do it with ease, like a small hug, reassuring you that everything will be fine in the end.

I hope you will find her as interesting as I did when I first came in contact with her work. I believe she has a lot offer in the artistic world, her themes remain until today difficult to comprehend and explain to normal people and I believe Antoniou has a way of expressing her thoughts through her art and coming across to others, or at east it really did to me.

I hope you liked today's post, until next time i'll see you in another post!

xoxoxo