Zoumboulakis Gallery presents the solo exhibition Aerial Passages of Marina Genadieva, which opens on Tuesday, April 2 2024.
Takis Koubis reports on the works of Marina Genadieva:
[“The Buffer Zone of Cyprus as image act”
The Buffer Zone has been defined since 1974 as an extension of the Green Line, whose name and geopolitical aspect comes from a green pencil line drawn on the map of Nicosia by the British Major-General Peter Young. This was the gesture that preceded the geopolitical division, giving precedence to the visual representation of the neutral zone.
As a result, the land of Mesaoria between the mountains of Troodos and Pentadaktylos is off-limits to human crossing, inadvertently creating a primordial Nature, a peculiar Eden, a non-place of plants and animals that hosts some of the rarest species of endemic and endangered flora and fauna. This paradoxical Nature poses anew the questions of the natural condition of the visual artwork and calls upon art to show the visible yet indiscernible paths, the invisible crossings of boundaries, the passages that link the traces of humans, plants and animals, affording the unique opportunity for art to remove the distinction between the forms of Nature and the works of visual art.
The Aerial Passages of Marina Genadieva pose the question of crossing boundaries and above all the motions of crossing invisible boundaries such as those of the Buffer Zone, which are not marked on the ground or in maps but are perceived through intuition and vision. Here, the presence of the works aims to turn the visual form into active image and set the work in motion through interaction with the observer. Consequently, these are not representations but works that become image acts, as they visually embody their conversion into artefacts in action.
The dominant theme of the exhibition focuses on the motif of the curtain, which in Western imagery marks the frame of the artwork, opening up a field of symbolism and ambivalence by covering/uncovering the image’s ambiguous points. In Aerial Passages the curtain (2022; 215x335x50cm) consists of one-and-a-half million glass beads threaded by hand, transposing the experience of painting into space. The subtle movement caused by the air—the breath of the space—creates multiple openings, passages into the area of invisible boundaries ensured by the focus of the spatial image onto a specific zone midway from the viewer’s position. This image in motion establishes the true condition of the landscape, conveying the primordial experience of Nature.
The “Remains” of dead flowers—symbols of the absence of the bodies of dead or missing people—attempt to add corporeality to the living form of the image. The Mines make the Buffer Zone a non-place of neutrality, constituting at once a threat against and a protection for an immaculate nature. As sculptures, they turn into images in order to shed their dangerousness and convey the true neutrality of the non-place.
The endemic and rare plants of the Buffer Zone as direct natural prints in a botanist’s herbarium suggest a fusion of the images of science and art. The Craters as outcomes of minefield explosions turn into krater vases, their open lips revealing the innards of the form and activating the latent condition of the images.
The land of the Buffer Zone foretells, on an anthropological and moral-political level, the passage of refugees and migrants to other lands thanks to the catalytic mediation of neutrality. Similarly, Genadieva’s images attempt to migrate from Cyprus, cross different countries and survive, just as the images in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas migrate from the Mediterranean Basin towards the centre of Europe.]
Short Bio:
Marina Genadieva is a visual artist who lives and works in Athens and Nicosia. She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts (2010–2016), and continued with the same school’s postgraduate programme in Visual Arts (2020–2022). In 2014 she attended the Kunstuniversität Linz in Austria on an Erasmus scholarship. Her Aerial Passages artwork was selected by UNFICYP for display at Nicosia’s Ledra Palace Hotel (4-8 March 2024) as part of the events for the sixty-year presence of the United Nations in Cyprus. In 2023 she had her first solo exhibition at the Art Seen Gallery in Nicosia. She has taken part in group exhibitions in Greece and abroad: “Ink and Stone”, Zoumboulakis Gallery, Athens (2023); Land[e]scapes, Art Seen Gallery, Limassol, Cyprus (2023); Proxy Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2022); Platforms Project NET, Athens (2021); “Art Knows No Borders”, Athens School of Fine Arts & Ministry of Migration & Asylum (2021); “Art Your Service”, Kypria International Festival, Nicosia, Cyprus (2019); “The Performance Shop,” Athens & Epidaurus Festival (2018); Athens Municipal Gallery (2015); 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art & Kodra Field of Action (2015); 7th Student Biennale of the Athens School of Fine Arts, Theocharakis Foundation (2014); “International Painting Annual 4”, Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (2014), etc.
