Modes of Persistence
Greg Carideo, Michelle S. Cho, Lito Kattou, Christos Kyriakides, Kang Seung Lee, Omar Mismar
Pop-up show in Limassol, Cyprus
The show reflects on contemporary archaeology as a set of artistic methods rather than a discipline tied to excavation or chronology. Across different practices, the artists work through processes of recollection, extraction, and reworking — drawing from both distant histories and very recent events that, in the digital era, have become conceptually and visually blurred. Images, gestures, and objects circulate without stable temporal markers, making it increasingly difficult to locate the moment of their origin.
Within this condition, the artists revisit forms of sacred imagery and symbolic heritage, displacing them into states of banality, repetition, or quiet erosion. Conversely, ordinary and everyday materials are elevated into charged artefacts, treated as newly sacralized remnants. Familiar forms are rendered ambiguous, hovering between document and fiction, monument and residue.
Rather than proposing a linear reading of history, the works unfold through layered temporalities and cultural crossings. Meaning emerges through accumulation, slippage, and juxtaposition — across generations, geographies, and belief systems. In this sense, the exhibition approaches archaeology not as the recovery of a fixed past, but as an ongoing negotiation with fragments that continue to shift, migrate, and re-signify in the present.
