Haris Epaminonda

Originally shot on 16-mm film in Cyprus, Chapters (2013) unfolds as a series of meticulously staged scenes shot between remote landscapes, archeological sites and whitewashed empty interior spaces. Haris Epaminonda (*1980 Cyprus, lives in Berlin) makes use of the island’s evocative terrain. The film’s saturated colors, desert imagery, abstract mythological references and geometric cinematography gives a sense of timelessness adopting a fictive quality.

With its prominent imagery of the eternal burning sun, a visual space opens up between various temporal and spatial dimensions whereby both subjects and objects are constantly shifting and being reassembled. Without following a strict linear sequence, underlying notions such as that of love, desire and afterlife are evoked by the actions of the performers and through the film’s audiovisual trajectory. Common to almost all of the artist’s serial-driven work, Chapters yields a mysterious sense of incompleteness.

Alongside a limited number of scenic tableaux and reduced gestures, Chapters visual narrative is accompanied by archaic and mythical sounds such as a flute playing continually interrupted by the ticking of mechanical clocks. The soundtrack has been created specifically by the duo Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides (Kelly Jayne Jones and Pascal Nichols), combining sounds recorded on the set with samples that the musicians produced with instruments from various geographies and eras. The reference back to ancient objects and musical instruments points to the artist’s overall practice of uniting references from the past and the present re-contextualising and invoking potential images of future worlds. The latter can be traced in the staging and movement of the performers, whose made-up faces and precious garments underscore the rhythm and visual poetry of the film which gets by without the spoken word.

With this work, Epaminonda transforms her home country into a backdrop for a multitude of mythological identities, working against ​“art-historical amnesia” to portray art-making as a kind of enigmatic social ritual.

In the upholding and ongoing refinement of rituals that point to a shared history of the displayed community, the important interplay of the individual and the group becomes clear, so that a relaxed self-evidence can be observed in their interaction.