[spectre] UNCOVERED - Nicosia International Airport

[Basak Senova]

UNCOVERED
NICOSIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Cyprus
2010-2013

www.uncovered-cyprus.com
info at uncovered-cyprus.com

UNCOVERED is a long-term research-based art and media project under the curatorship of Basak Senova and Pavlina Paraskevaidou. It was initiated in 2010, based on Cypriot artist Vicky Pericleous’s idea for an artistic intervention at the Nicosia International Airport, subsequently submitted as a proposal to the UNDP by Özgül Ezgin and Argyro Toumazou parallel to the peace-negotiations process. Three terms – “memory construction,” “commons,” and “control mechanisms” – form the conceptual springboard for the project, which begins by developing a space of encounter for cultural producers from across the divided island.

Lying abandoned inside the buffer zone since July 1974, off limits for the local population, the Nicosia Airport represents a spatial order generated by 36 years of UN control. The airport is a riddle nested within paradoxical questions of protection – Protected. Unprotected. Covered. Uncovered. Protected for whom? Protected from whom? – It is a spatial lapse, an episode of total invisibility.

The Nicosia airport once served as the central port of entry and departure from the country. Now empty and protected from view, its former importance exists only in the islanders’ childhood memories. The novelty of its architecture, with its much-hailed new terminal, has acquired a rich patina of forgetting. A monument to a failed modernism, the airport embodies a history that is written only to be erased and re-written all over again. Due to the historical significance of the airport – along with its role in personal histories of division and survival in a state of suspended animation – there is no doubt that the airport – the building, the site, the land it occupies – plays a critical role in the construction of the island’s collective memory. UNCOVERED, then, places key importance on issues of memory and amnesia.

UNCOVERED examines how control mechanisms have been operating in the island on multiple levels via the airport. The project explores how this space, frozen in time, indicates and exposes the operational and organizational logics of control that have evolved on the island over the past decades. One can even see it as an attempt to understand the ways protocols can be customized and complex systems can be manipulated by control mechanisms.

UNCOVERED also questions the politics of space as it has been exercised on the island, challenges the validity of control mechanisms, and asks questions that move beyond the ubiquitous mnemonic to pain in order to ultimately reclaim the island’s “commons.”

The project’s two phases are to span three years. With the Nicosia International Airport, located within the UN Protected Area, as its point of departure, the project aims to engage the local population closely, working with artists from both sides of the island to produce works and content that incorporate diverse critical perspectives on the ongoing conditions of instability. The first phase is dedicated to data collection and the development of these local perspectives. It will culminate in an exhibition, seminar, and book launch in October 2011. The second phase will expand to include international partners, and will focus on data processing and case analysis through panels, workshops, and publications. This second phase will give priority to the commission and presentation of international art projects under the auspices of UNCOVERED, both on Cyprus and abroad, while developing and improving facilities for art production on Cyprus itself.

The curatorial work of the UNCOVERED project will be presented and discussed by Basak Senova during the Sharjah Art Foundation’s 4th Annual March Meeting. The March Meeting is a three-day cultural symposium featuring presentations by international artists, institutions, and art professionals on artistic practice and production in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. It will precede the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial from March 16 to May 16, 2011. 

The partners of UNCOVERED are European-Mediterranean Art Association, The Pharos Arts Foundation, and Anadolu Kültür.