Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale presents Marina Xenofontos: It rests to the bones

VENICE.— Marina Xenofontos will represent the Republic of Cyprus at the 61st Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition of new work titled It rests to the bones. The exhibition is curated by Kyle Dancewicz.

It rests to the bones brings together diverse approaches to artmaking that Xenofontos has developed over the last fifteen years, including motorized machines; “historical” sculpture that physically replicates sites or events, often from archival sources; and documentary audiovisual forms.

The exhibition includes Passer, an animatronic sculpture of a sparrow clinging to life, and Threads, an installation of copper cylinders that rotate on their axes (all works 2026). Where earlier traditions of kinetic production—from automata to some twentieth-century sculpture—sought to imbue inert materials with “liveness” or to render imperceptible phenomena visible, Xenofontos’ machines foreground something close to, but not quite, life: mechanical endurance, the physicality of recursion, and endless loops.

Xenofontos’ overarching artistic endeavor is what she describes as an “unconditional archive”: an accumulation of interrelated ideas, sites, objects, and political and social conditions that undergird the present. Within Xenofontos’ work, art produces state changes that confer new status: archival materials resurface as artworks that act as artifacts of alternative culture. An anxiety around historical loss motivates this effort and reflects urgent concerns for an artist born one generation past the start of an occupation, and two past a period regarded as a golden age for Cyprus, though the features of these times can only be accessed piecemeal, second-hand, and within the context of Cyprus today. In the context of the the Venice Biennale, her work reflects an intimate and searching approach to national representation that contends with a persistent loss of cultural information through time.

From her archival pool Xenofontos developed Interior of a Nightclub. Installed overhead in the pavilion’s entry gallery, this work is a replica of the ceiling of the Perroquet, a nightlife venue once emblematic of Cyprus’ postcolonial promise that has been sealed off in the “ghost city” of Varosha, near Famagusta, since the Turkish invasion of 1974. Xenofontos draws from a photograph taken there in 2020 showing a derelict dance floor and wall murals by Christoforos Savva, a leading figure of Cypriot modernism.

In a similar mode of preservation and recovery, the exhibition is scored with folk songs sung by the Ayisilaou sisters—elder women in Xenofontos’ family—recorded for the first and only time in their village in 2020. Mixed as new tracks by collaborator Panagiotis Mina, they constitute a searing musical protest against everyday conservatism, locating alterity within traditional forms.

Across its citations and abstractions, Xenofontos’ work asks what restless forms will carry almost-lived experience—of one’s family, of a promising historical milieu, of another generation—into the future. Together, the kinetic and archival aspects of Xenofontos’ practice suggest a back-end system, something mechanical and metaphysical, that labors to keep diffuse, loss-prone data close at hand. As heavy as its tasks of storage and retrieval could feel, Xenofontos’ work instead engenders an ineffable, sometimes shimmering, transformation of near history into present concern.

Marina Xenofontos (born Limassol, Cyprus, 1988; lives and works in Athens, Greece and Limassol) recently has been the subject of the solo exhibitions at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2026); Mint, Stockholm (2025); Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna (2025); Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2025); Kunstverein Hamburg (2024); Camden Art Centre, London; and SculptureCenter, New York (2023). Xenofontos holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York and attended residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris. Xenofontos has been engaged in artist-led initiatives and collective practices in Cyprus as a co-founder of Konteiner Space, Limassol (2010–13) and the collective artist space Neoterismoi Toumazou, Nicosia (2011–18).

Panagiotis Mina (born Larnaca, Cyprus, in 1982; lives and works in Pyrga, Cyprus) has worked as an artist in Cyprus since 2003, focusing his research on noise, folk, and the sublime. Mina is the founder of Pyrgatory Studios; co-founder of sound performance platform Noise of Ozon, a key member of the D.I.together collective Honest Electronics, and one half of the band OGMIOS (with Andis Skordis). He holds a BA in Communication Culture and Media at Coventry University, UK.

Kyle Dancewicz (born Boston, USA in 1989; lives and works in New York City, USA) is deputy director of SculptureCenter, New York, which he joined in 2016. At SculptureCenter, he recently curated the exhibitions Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother (2024), Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili (2022), Henrike Naumann: Re-Education (2022), and SoiL Thornton, Niloufar Emamifar, and an Oral History of Knobkerry (2021), among others.