Maria Loizidou: Do I really believe it?

Maria Loizidou
Do I Really believe it?
Organized by Klitsa Antoniou

Open Lecture: Do I Really believe it?
Amphitheatre 1, Tassos Papadopoulos Building, Themis and Ifigenias corner
Introduction by Dr Efi Kyprianidou
Monday 12 October 2020, 20:00

Workshop: Do I Really believe it?
12-16 October 2020
Public Installation

The international practice-based project Collaborative Art Project was successfully launched in 2020 by Professor Klitsa Antoniou with guest artist Maria Loizidou. Within the framework of this program, artists with international recognition and significant work are invited to share aspects of their work with the students of the Department, as well as with the general public. The aim of the program is on the one hand to offer participants a "toolkit" for observing, recording and analyzing the work of the invited artists, which they will be able to adapt later in their own artistic process, and on the other hand to familiarize them with experimental artistic interventions of a collaborative nature. 

Maria Loizidou, is a visual artist with an international presence and important contribution in the development of contemporary art in Cyprus. The artist collaborated with the Department by offering special laboratory workshops in order to create a work of participatory art with the students. These workshops were based on ‘’The form of a proposal and its content”, encouraging students to develop a relationship with themselves through drawing and volume.

Within the framework of the Collaborative Art Project, the artist delivered a lecture under the title "Do I really believe it?", in which she attempted to reconstruct her personal artistic experience, through a series of questions from her close collaborators that were invited to suggest. The artist by responding to these questions and using photographic and conceptual references, she uncovered the main milestones of her work, its practice, the issues that have always preoccupied it, thus allowing the audience the opportunity to understand the importance of synergies and proposals of a cooperative nature in her practice.

The third stage of the collaboration between the visual artist and the Department of Fine Arts was based on a public installation constructed on audiovisual material of the students' work around the reading of themselves, its visual representation and their relationship with the surrounding area. Maria Loizidou is a visual artist, educated in Lyon, France and settled in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has taken part in exhibitions (Documenta 14, 2017, Venice Biennale of Art, Cyprus National participation, Arsenal 1986 and Architecture, Cyprus and Greek National group participation, 2016, 2006, 2004). She created public projects (Kerameikos, Athens, Fatima, Portugal, Futuroscope, Poitier) and gave lectures in various institutions. Relevant collaborations with museums (MAMC, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Saint Etienne, Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon, Benaki Museum, Athens, EMST, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Sungkok Museum, Seoul, Bozar: Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) keep renewing her work’ s perspective enriching it with social and political concerns giving emphasis to “the power of fragility”. Her collaboration with AA & U for Architecture, Art and Urbanism has given her the possibility to address such issues on an interdisciplinary level.

■ marialoizidou.com