MARIOS PAVLOU
URGENCY OF ACTUALITY
Group exhibition with YGRASIA collective, part of Limassol Art Walks, 2024.
The collective “Ygrasia” (Kalaqs, Marios Pavlou, and Ria Alexandrou) inaugurated their artist-run space, with the exhibition "Urgency of Actuality.”
The artists are based in Limassol, where they observe and experience significant changes in the landscape and everyday life. Memories of their surrounding environment disappear, replaced by new realities that they must engage with and eventually coexist. In this context, the "Ygrasia" collective seeks ways of meaningful expression and opening dialogues, creating works that combine text, sound, projections, and ephemeral spatial interventions.
Through this exhibition, they explore the relationships between temporality and permanence, the uncanny and the familiar, creating their own narratives.
Using appropriation literature techniques, Pavlou erases words and sentences (as well as sketching on top of images) found in newspaper articles to reconstruct narratives and give texts other definitions often focusing on poetics, humour and language games.
They use this method since a young age and they apply it in already existing texts found in books, articles but also in their own writings.
Photos of people from Limassol found in newspapers were transferred on watercolour paper. The blur effect is created through multiple watering layers in a process to imprint the image on a new surface.The watercolour transfers were then inserted in LUMA AI program, in a trial to identify the initial persons and animate them.
The outcome of the video, is based on a prompt given to the program of artificial intelligence, to identify which these figures of Limassol are and try to animate them based on the body gestures that they have, using specific camera movements.
