Double feature: Theodoulos Polyviou
A palace in exile
Julia Stoschek Foundation
2024
12.09.2024 – 27.04.2025
more info: here
Spanning video, sculpture, archival objects, photography, and prints, DOUBLE FEATURE: THEODOULOS POLYVIOU introduces the third chapter of the artist’s series Transmundane Economies (2022 – ongoing) to Germany. In this series, Polyviou deploys digital technologies like virtual reality and CGI filmmaking to study, reconstruct, and fill in historical gaps of Cypriot cultural heritage. His speculative approach circumvents nationalist agendas by offering alternative ways to revisit the historical complexities of the island and to imagine its future.
The central site-responsive video installation A Palace in Exile (2024) was produced in collaboration with architectural designer Loukis Menelaou as the culmination of Polyviou’s long-term research. The video consists entirely of computer-generated images, which jump between two places and time periods: the Julia Stoschek Foundation in the present and Cyprus in the 1950s, a decade characterized by ethnic and nationalist tensions in the process of gaining independence from British colonial rule.
The video’s narrative concentrates on the first architectural competition in the region launched in the 1950s for the construction of a new Archbishop’s Palace for the Church of Cyprus. This was hotly debated in the press, showing the role architecture played in shaping the island’s national identity. These debates are communicated via a voice-over edited from newspaper articles from the 1950s and 1960s, which the artist sourced from the digital archive of the Press and Information Office in Nicosia (capital of Cyprus). In the end, the new palace was built in a Neo-Byzantine style, after three shortlisted proposals were deemed too modern by the Church and other conservative forces.
In the video, Polyviou and Menelaou present their virtual entry into the competition, placing real and speculative histories in dialogue. Their design draws upon the teachings and drawings of Daskalos, a Cypriot mystic and healer active from the 1950s to the 1990s, whose esoteric practice presents a counter to the hegemonic identity put forward by the Church and the state. In 1952, Daskalos was summoned to the old Archbishop’s Palace to publicly renounce all ties to occultism and spiritualism, although he later continued to practice and expanded his following. In addition to the video installation, the presentations feature a wall-mounted print of Polyviou and Menelaou’s design for the palace.
The exhibition opens up one of Polyviou’s key interests: how architectures and technologies together have the potential to engender ritual and sacred experiences in a kind of “technospirituality.” Creating virtual spaces within actual architectures, he invites us to enter environments that expand our understandings of identity and belonging, and place us in hybrid worlds where past, present, and future collide.
A Palace in Exile was produced by Fondazione Elpis in Milan, where it premiered in spring 2023. The video installation is a collaboration with architectural designer Loukis Menelaou, with sound production by x.ypno.
THEODOULOS POLYVIOU (b. 1989, Cyprus) is a Berlin-based artist who works with expanded and immersive media to consider the place of queer bodies within institutional spaces, cultural and political narratives, and the digital realm. His ongoing project Transmundane Economies uses virtual reality to create site-responsive works that foreground a speculative approach to history and archaeology, and reflect on the material and ideological value of historical artifacts and the politics of ownership. In Polyviou’s practice, digital technologies such as extended reality and artificial intelligence open up novel ways to revisit history.
In 2020 Polyviou co-curated Mediterranea 19: “School of Waters” in San Marino. He has presented solo shows at the Bode Museum, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, among others. He has participated in various group shows, including the Cyprus Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021).
DOUBLE FEATURE is a series of solo presentations, with each artist’s work on view at JSF Berlin and Düsseldorf simultaneously, curated by Line Ajan and Lisa Long, and supported by Team Global.