REA AFANTITOU

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A photograph pinned to a corner of my workshop wall for many years. Forty people, women, men and children, members of a small community in Cyprus (Lania) present themselves, without inventing them, with an undisguised innocence. The frontal posture and the gazes in the photograph by J.P. Foscolo from the 1890s reflect collectively like a mirror and provoke the wonder of my own investigation into a complex network of human connections.

Between the matter that surrounds me and the fragments of memory reserves, the necessity for updating the unfamiliar in each present time is constantly pending.

Again, and again the persistence of the gaze provokes thought and emotion. A need for personal repatriation arises by opening the field of photography, deconstructing and reconstructing new compositions of meaning with material from my own experiential reserve. Sounds, words, smells, images, symbols, people and landscapes.

The vulnerable, the fragile, the irrevocable, the expected. How we ultimately define our essence as individuals but also as collectivities.

Rea Afantitou was born in Nicosia in 1960. She studied Plastic Arts in France – Universite de Provence Aix-Marseille. She lives and works in Nicosia. Her artistic career is based on the study and research of concepts such as the trace as a carrier of memory, forgetting, identity, otherness. Her work is conceptually charged through the semantic value of the material -painting medium, metal, fabric, cotton, transparency, objet trouve etc.-

She has presented her works in solo and group exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad. She has taken part in the XVII Alexandria Biennale with a group of artists from Cyprus in 1991 and in the Sharjah Biennale –United Arab Emirates in 1999 with a group of artists from Greece.

With her work she has been invited to participate in group exhibitions in Cyprus, Greece, England, France, Spain, Malta and Belgium.

Rea Afantitou's parallel occupation since her return to Cyprus until today is the teaching of Art. In 1985 she created the HELIOS Art Workshop with the aim of Visual Education by organizing educational programs, exhibitions, exhibitions, lectures and seminars.