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Yiannos Economou

A Planet in Common

DIATOPOS ART CENTRE

Diatopos Art Centre presents the new solo exhibition by Yiannos Economou, titled A Planet in Common, curated by Daphne Nikita. Opening Wednesday 21 2026 at 7 pm. The exhibition will last until November 13, 2026.

The artist continues to investigate the growing separation between humans and nature. The title implies that the planet does not belong to one species alone, but it is shared among all living things. Humans in this show remain firmly in the background, appearing only through technological traces such as roads, buildings, and airplanes; sometimes in a symbiotic relation, but often acting with alarming consequences to other living things.

The protagonists are animals moving through a human-made landscape. The main work, a multi-channel video installation, centres on a real dispute between a cat and two crows in the artist’s neighbourhood, which he was able to capture, to some extent, with his camera. The relentless pursuit of the crows and the obvious discomfort of the cat, reveal the animals’ acute perception and emotional complexity, including anger and a desire for revenge. More importantly, it suggests their capacity to create, retain, and remember stories. This saga, along with other incidents in the video, reveals a form of passionate and emotional inner world that is strikingly similar to humans. It refutes the myth of a mechanistic behaviour which is guided only by the instincts of survival and procreation. 

Nevertheless, it is a real-life animal drama made for human spectators. Jacques Derrida, attentive to the power of the gaze, observes that Western philosophers and scientists, with very few exemptions, have long looked at animals without acknowledging that animals also look back. This hierarchy can be traced back to the book of “Genesis”, where man names the animals and is granted dominion over nature. In this video, however, the animals return our gaze. They look directly into the lens, challenging the authority traditionally granted to the human observer.

As Derrida writes, “The animal is looking at us and we are naked”; he then adds, more obliquely, “This is maybe where language begins.”

The anger, desire for revenge, fear, and agony of death displayed by our fellow non-human people, as Timothy Morton calls them, resonate with Amitav Ghosh’s question: “What if it was the people who were regarded by elite Westerners as brutes and savages—the people who would see signs of vitality, life, and meaning in beings of many other kinds—who were right all along? What if the idea that the Earth teems with other beings who act, communicate, tell stories, and make meaning is taken seriously?”

Born in Cyprus, Yiannos Economou is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted primarily in video, while extending into film, photography, and animation. After initially studying Economics in the UK, he returned to full-time education and received a Fine Arts degree and a Master’s from the Kent Institute of Arts and Design. Economou’s video practice is distinguished by an attentive engagement with the inherent qualities of the medium: its immediacy, its capacity to register unmediated sound and image, and its ability to hold moments of reality in suspension. Through this approach, he constructs poetic and contemplative works in which the observed world becomes a site for reflection on perception, time, and the increasingly tenuous relationship between humanity and nature. His recent solo exhibitions, Therianthropes (A+ Gallery, Nicosia, 2022) and BioGeoMetries (Knapp Gallery, London, 2022), articulate these concerns through works that consider the erosion of the boundaries separating the human from the natural environment.

In parallel with his individual practice, Economou has developed an active collaborative engagement with artists and theorists addressing the ecological and political conditions of the present. In 2022, he co-founded In Sutu, an informal collective whose name evokes the interconnectedness of all things and whose activities unfold under the umbrella of Sotto Voce Contemporary Arts. The group has since presented work in exhibitions and projects across Cyprus and internationally, including Art for a Wounded Planet, The Old Future Is Gone, Beyond the Skin, and Sound Makes Space: A Homage to Robert Wilson in Dialogue with Hans-Jorn Brandenburg. Economou’s recent work continues to investigate the intersections of ecology, embodiment, technology, and perception, proposing video not simply as a means of documenting the world, but as a space through which its fragile and often unseen connections can be sensed and reconsidered.

Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday 16:30-19:00 Saturday 11:00-13:00

After -hours by appointment.

Diatopos Art Centre, 11 DZ, Crete Street, Nicosia 1061

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