‘11 Parthenon’ Embraces Intimacy Over Spectacle

The smell of cheese lingers in the air at 11 Parthenon Street, the home of Andre Zivanari, director of Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia. Several uneven slices are stacked up on the kitchen counter near a lit candle and a faded hydrangea. Seemingly a regular domestic scene, the arrangement, understated yet performative, prompts a second glance. Iris Touliatou’s still-life composition Analogue (cheese platter) (2025) is, in fact, a sociological portrait of Cypriot society, with the varying sizes and ages of the cheese mirroring statistics on the country’s class distribution. By reclaiming the still life genre from the perpetuity of the painted tradition, Touliatou returns it to the ephemerality of material decay. This piece is one of many installed throughout Zivanari’s house as part of the second chapter of a trilogy of exhibitions, titled ‘11 Parthenon’, shaped in close collaboration with the artist Haris Epaminonda, and making a compelling case for intimacy as exhibition form.

Like Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse (1972), the domestic setting of ‘11 Parthenon’ is more than a backdrop; it creates a space in which the boundaries between art and life, reality and fiction, become porous. To walk through the house is to perform a different kind of looking – one attuned to the shifts and glitches of daily rhythm. In the laundry room, still faintly smelling of freshly washed linen, Maria Toumazou’s sculptures play with scale and sentiment. In Untitled (2025), oversized and slightly anthropomorphic tissue boxes lean against the walls like tentative guests. Crisp waves of tissue paper spill out theatrically from their narrow oval slits, playing with seduction and absurdity. In a disorienting, Alice in Wonderland-like twist, it is the room and its visitors that appear to have shrunk in front of this surrealist disruption. Downstairs, tucked into a hallway corner, a modest pile of feathers prompts a similar emotional response. In an homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s iconic works, Petrit Halilaj’s Untitled (For Felix) (2020) proposes a fragile and intimate monument to a loved one by exhibiting the contents of their pillow.

In the basement, Stelios Kallinikou’s short black and white film documenting a clockmaker at work, Two minutes twenty two seconds thirty two milliseconds (2024), plays quietly on a pull-up screen. Around the screen, shelves of obsolete electronics – VHS players, laser printers, Hi-Fi systems – catch the flicker of the film. The room becomes a cabinet of curiosities for recent analogue technology that seems so far removed from our digital present. In an adjacent room, Kallinikou’s Star Gaze (2019), a photograph depicting the night sky, hangs on the wall. What could be a nebula or a stellar cluster on the left side of the image is, in fact, the condensation of the artist’s breath, caught during the long exposure. His exhalations appear as a constellation, collapsing the ungraspable distance between the human body and the cosmos. ‘A world of dew’, as Kobayashi Issa says in his 1819 haiku, ‘and yet, and yet’. 

Upstairs in the office, where the domestic is hidden behind a more typical gallery setup, delicate leaves bearing photo-printed portraits in Kyriakos Kyriakides’s Leaves family (2024) gather in a quiet corner. Inside a vitrine by the window, Polys Peslikas’s beautiful pencil drawings trace anonymous bodies (Chorus of Savages: Peaceful forests, here, a vain desire never troubles our hearts, 2020–25). It is only in this familiar white-cube setting that the full resonance of the exhibition becomes clear. Freed from the institutional, unifying frame, these works instead engage with the textures of everyday life. ‘11 Parthenon’ exposes the home as a site of accumulation – of emotions and quotidian histories – a space for gentle interruptions and understated transformations.

‘11 Parthenon’ is on view at 11 Parthenon Street, Ayios Andreas, Nicosia, until 27 June 

_{Main image: Christoforos Savva, Untitled, 1967–68, cement relief, 200 × 150 cm. Courtesy: Private Collection; photograph: © Haris Epaminonda}