Nicosia, Cyprus. The exhibition Agropoetics: soils ⁄bodies is showing at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (SPEL building) in Nicosia’s old town. Part of Cyprus’ EU Presidency cultural programme, it runs until June 30 and presents different approaches to landscape.
Exhibition focus and curatorial approach
Curator Dr Elena Parpa said the exhibition examines “our relationship with the Cypriot landscape,” including “the land and the place,” and how the relationship between humans and nature is translated into images and symbols that become art.
The exhibition combines historical and contemporary artists, drawing works from state, municipal and private collections, alongside more recently made pieces. The media on display include painting, textiles, ceramics, photography, text and video.
Historic artists and rural labour
Agropoetics opens with paintings by artists known for depicting Cyprus landscapes, including Adamantios Diamantis, Lefteris Economou and Telemachos Kanthos. Parpa said the opening group was selected because these historic works depict a close relationship with the land.
Parpa said the works show women who “dominate the landscape,” cultivate it, and care for it, bringing themes of care and collective labour into focus. She described the artists as part of the first generation who left Cyprus to study abroad and, after returning, turned their attention to the Cypriot countryside, often centring the rural woman in their work.
On the ground level, the exhibition includes a piece by Maria Michaelides, described as the only woman artist on that floor, whose work often featured rural working women carrying pitchers. According to the curator, themes of female labour, interaction with animals and the land run through the artworks on the ground floor.
“These pieces give visibility to a form of labour that is very often invisible,” Parpa said, referring to labour connected to physical effort and to women in the countryside in direct relationship with the natural world. She added that the exhibition raises the question of what happens now that these women are no longer present to care for the landscape, saying it is not an attempt to romanticise the past but to acknowledge it and consider more meaningful relationships between humans and nature.
Contemporary interpretations of landscape
On the upper levels, contemporary artists approach the theme of landscape in less literal terms. Parpa said the works shift the meaning of landscape from cultivating the land to ideas of identity, territory, ecology and remembrance.
What aspects of Cyprus’ landscape and human connection to it would you want to explore through art?
