​Point 

This is Epaminonda’s first solo exhibition in Cyprus, focusing primarily on the film Chapters, her most elaborate film project to date, filmed in various locations in Cyprus last autumn and created in close collaboration with Point Centre for Contemporary Art.

Haris Epaminonda often uses pre-existing materials, assembling them in ways to create works, multi-layered installations and videos that remain enigmatic while defying classification. Her works rather suggest a flattening of the hierarchy between things offering a place where illusion coexists with the tangible, and where each thing can be read and examined on a single plane.

Chapters is a poetic series of meticulously staged scenes, with underlying narrative elements of love, longing, afterlife and ritual. Visitors can expect to encounter a universe of melancholic beauty in which the artist crafts timeless atmospheres, placing Cypriot landscapes as the protagonists. Many of the objects, sets and costumes have been designed and produced in Cyprus, others have been granted by the Cyprus Theatre Organization. The scenes duel between light and dark, day and night, interior and exterior, the near and the far. The actors, objects, animals and spaces shift back and forth between sculptural representations and their own symbolic and metaphorical meanings. There are various references to ancient myths and poetry, Renaissance painting and Byzantine iconography. The use of fixed camera is reminiscent of the tableaux-vivant from avant-garde cinema. A contemporary epic, Chapters is challenging the nature of classical fil­m-making. Originally filmed in 16mm film, and later converted into digital, it consists of four asynchronous projections (each about an hour long), totaling in a four-hour length film. The projections are playing simultaneously and on loop, with no beginning or end. There is no particular narrative structure and any linearity is deliberately undone, taking us on an associative journey that is constantly altered and recombined by the action of chance, time and the viewer’s gaze.

The mesmerizing soundtrack is composed by British sound-artists Kelly Jayne Jones and Pascal Nichols, also known as Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides. The artists parallel the methods used in the construction of the film, by piecing together sounds recorded on set with samples they produced using instruments from various eras as well as using field recordings from the set.

The symbolic and formal aspects of the film are abstracted and extended off-screen, in an installation of sparse arrangement of sculptural works in the rest of the exhibition space, belonging as such to Epaminonda's ongoing series Volumes, which began in 2009.