Blog

All This is Mine, 2007

Diatopos Art Centre is pleased to present All This is Mine, a major multimedia installation by internationally acclaimed artist Klitsa Antoniou curated by Daphne Nikita. This immersive and conceptually rich exhibition invites viewers into a layered landscape of memory, fragmentation, displacement, and metamorphosis. Through a constellation of sculptural assemblages, moving-image installations, sound works, mirror-pieces, and transformed domestic objects, Antoniou constructs an experiential environment charged with poetic ambiguity and pressing political resonance.

Rather than unfolding through linear narrative or singular meaning, Antoniou’s work operates in shifting layers. In All This is Mine, discrete works coalesce into a non-linear, symbolic “floating land”—a terrain where the personal and the collective, the intimate and the historical, intersect. The viewer is drawn into a series of spatial thresholds and perceptual dislocations, where possession, loss, identity, and the disjointed experience of place come to the fore. Familiar objects and spaces are rendered uncanny; the strange becomes eerily intimate.

At the heart of the exhibition is the eponymous installation All This is Mine—a series of nine altered mirrors, each scratched, etched, or inscribed to reveal fragments of family photographs, artworks, and drawings. The viewer’s reflection merges with these archival remnants, creating a constantly shifting visual dialogue between past and present. In the larger mirrors, mechanically activated moving images appear and dissolve, suggesting the fluid and unstable nature of memory. This work evokes the Deleuzian notion of the “crystal-image”—a moment in which past and present coexist, and memory is no longer a record but a reflective, refracted surface of temporal flux.

The exhibition’s title, All This is Mine, plays on the multivalence of the word “mine”: as a possessive declaration, a site of extraction, and a latent threat. This linguistic richness finds sculptural expression in MineFace, where a handwoven carpet hovers slightly above the ground, illuminated from beneath. The word “MINE” is repeatedly embedded into its surface, evoking a complex interplay of ownership, claim, and caution. The subtle elevation of the carpet creates a perceptual detachment, as if it floats between presence and absence. The light below casts ephemeral shadows, heightening the sense of fragility and precarity. Here, domestic comfort is infused with latent danger; the aesthetic softness of the surface belies the warning inscribed within.

The precariousness of the domestic realm is further explored in Demining, a haunting time-based video installation. A faceless woman methodically scans the interior of a home for landmines. Every 20 seconds, the video is interrupted, and nearby vessels of red liquid begin to swirl, enacting a silent choreography of tension and suppressed threat. Her search is unending, obsessive. The home becomes a metaphorical minefield—simultaneously a refuge and a site of unease, a repository of memory and trauma, security and suspicion.

In Around the World in 15’’, Antoniou creates a disorienting cycle of calm and disruption. Every fifteen seconds, a serene projection of birds resting on a floating picture-frame is shattered by the sound of gunfire and blinding strobe lights. The juxtaposition is visceral: innocence and violence oscillate in a continuous loop that resists narrative closure. The viewer is suspended in a temporal rhythm of rupture—a metaphor for the collapse of utopia into dystopia, the fragile equilibrium of peace always on the verge of breaking.

Throughout the exhibition, Antoniou conducts a form of conceptual archaeology. Her works do not merely evoke memory—they interrogate its mechanisms: its silences, distortions, erasures, and repetitions. Materials such as aged carpets, scratched mirrors, residual liquids, and archival fragments act not as passive remnants but as charged vessels of emotional and historical tension. These are objects in transformation—haunted by what once was, and animated by what lingers.

What distinguishes All This is Mine is its capacity to merge the philosophical with the visceral. Antoniou’s environments provoke an embodied response. They inhabit the liminal space between domestic familiarity and quiet unease, between aesthetic seduction and latent threat. Boundaries between disciplines dissolve—public and private, memory and forgetting, fiction and historical truth become permeable membranes through which meaning flows and mutates.

While the works may draw from personal memory, their scope is unavoidably collective. The exhibition articulates the complex condition of belonging in a world marked by displacement, migration, hybridity, and contested histories. Antoniou’s spaces are not fixed destinations, but transitional states—interstitial zones shaped by longing, uncertainty, and transformation.

Ultimately, All This is Mine resists resolution. It offers no easy narrative, no catharsis, no closure. Instead, it dwells in ambiguity—an ambiguity that is at once disquieting and generative. Viewers are left to navigate this terrain as witnesses, participants, and carriers of their own memories and dislocations. In Antoniou’s world, memory is not something preserved but something perpetually returned to, unsettled and reframed.

What, then, is truly “mine”? A possession? A wound? A trace? A warning?