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TRACES OF MEMORY, 2002
Diatopos Art Centre presents Traces of Memory, a major multimedia installation by the Cypriot artist Klitsa Antoniou, curated by Daphne Nikita. Renowned for her politically engaged  visual language, Antoniou returns with a body of work that resists easy classification—resonating somewhere between ritual, remembrance, and rupture. Blending sculpture, installation, drawing, found objects, and both written and spoken word, Traces of Memory is a sensorially immersive and emotionally resonant exhibition that probes the fragile boundary between memory and history, trauma and transformation.

Born into a family of refugees displaced by the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Antoniou brings a visceral understanding of exile and belonging to her practice. In this latest body of work, she explores the role of the senses in preserving and reawakening memory, focusing on the surface of both the body and objects as archival sites—repositories of touch, time, and emotion.

The installation opens with A Wall of Roses, a monumental yet delicate structure composed of vertical rows of roses forming a partition within the gallery. The viewer is immediately confronted with a barrier—both visual and symbolic. Everyday kitchenware—cups, plates, pans—are carefully arranged beneath the floral curtain, evoking a quiet gathering of the uncontainable: memory, emotion, tradition, grief. This visual field conjures a forgotten ritual or cryptic domestic rite—at once beautiful and unsettling. As critic Vitaliano Corbi observes, the work elicits “a subtle psychological tension, distress, and discomfort.”

This tension is intentional. Antoniou destabilises our sense of the familiar. Her roses are not the celebratory blossoms of Gertrude Stein’s famous aphorism, but metaphors of ephemerality—“idyllic symbols of love and beauty gradually overtaken by death and decay.” The roses, like the human body, register the passage of time. In Antoniou’s hands, the fleeting becomes tactile, the invisible made visible.

Throughout the installation, Antoniou works not only with objects, but with imprints, textures, and residual traces—what she refers to as the “surface memory” of things. In dialogue with feminist artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Annette Messager, she deconstructs the female form and reassembles it in fragments. Here, the body is not whole, but partial, symbolic, and performative.

In one striking work, drawers remain ajar on fossilised tables, their surfaces etched with countless imprints—unreadable yet undeniable. These are the residues of lived experience, of unspoken narratives, of trauma endured and hope remembered. This “dense opacity,” as Vitaliano Corbi describes it, resists linguistic explanation and compels affective identification. The viewer becomes not just an observer, but a witness.

Elsewhere, Antoniou presents collaged montages reminiscent of early 20th-century Dada. Rusted irons, broken gates, pierced fans, and faded petals are brought together in surreal, charged juxtapositions. These altered domestic remnants become “symbols charged with meaning,” where the very act of decay transforms material into metaphor. As artist and archivist Lucy Watson notes, Antoniou “fast-forwards time,” using deterioration as a means to expose the fragility of life—and the urgency of remembering.

The female figure recurs throughout the installation—never passive, never idealised. Whether wrapped in bandages or adorned with fairy wings, the body becomes a site of vulnerability and resistance. Antoniou’s figures seduce and repel, inviting intimacy while confronting the discomfort of empathy. These bodies embody what Watson calls “the grief and despair of those affected by loss and displacement over which they have no control.”

At the core of the exhibition lies the presence of nostalgia—not as sentimental longing, but as political force. This is nostalgia for wholeness, for justice, for home. In the installation’s culmination, the faces of small children emerge from within wilted petals, hovering on the edge of disappearance. Roses, once vibrant, now hang inverted, their dried buds preserved not as emblems of life, but as echoes of what once was. These are not merely flowers; they are embodied memories, suspended between presence and absence.

The theme of absence runs throughout Traces of Memory. Antoniou does not represent loss—she materialises it. The absence of bodies is marked by the presence of their traces. Human existence is evoked through its disappearance—through abandoned objects, eroded surfaces, and fragmented remains. As Daphne Nikita writes, Antoniou’s work “moves from the personal to the collective,” addressing national trauma while speaking to universal experiences of exile, fragmentation, and survival.

The skin—the body’s surface—serves as a central metaphor. Like skin, objects retain marks. Like bodies, they remember. In ancient Chinese thought, the surface of the body contained the story of a life. Antoniou expands this belief, transforming domestic relics into vessels of history, inviting us to “read” them through touch, through sensation, through memory.

Traces of Memory is not a comforting exhibition. It offers no resolution, no passive contemplation. Instead, it demands emotional and psychological engagement. It asks: What do we carry with us? What do we leave behind? How do we remember? And—most critically—how do we resist forgetting?

In an era saturated with fleeting images and superficial narratives, Antoniou’s work reclaims the power of slowness, fragility, and detail. Without spectacle or didacticism, Traces of Memory reflects what Watson calls “a new seriousness”—an aesthetic and ethical commitment to confronting the complexities of post-traumatic realities, without surrendering to despair.