“Sisyphus” is a photographic diptych that brings together two stills from the video “Works and Days: The Sisyphus Files I”. Shot in Montenegro throughout a road trip in 2012 the film is part of an ongoing audiovisual essay on which the artist has been working on the last four years and for which she has been recursively visiting the Balkans seeking out sites along borders lying by rivers and lakes, where the course of the boundary remains uncertain. After having lost the entire first block of footage, the data on the hard drive not being retrievable, she sets out new footage over and over again, only to witness that the places do not exist anymore in the same way. Topographies seem to vanish and observations antiquate within this relatively short time span. In “The Sisyphus Files I” she follows a fisherman on the Adriatic coast that is one of the last in the region employing an outmoded, archaic-semblant method of fishing that is characterised by hard labour and little to no return. Yet the power of the will and persistence is what we are constantly confronted with whilst viewing the work.
Marianna Christofides is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker examining the perceptional possibilities that lie beyond the picture. She studied Visual and Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Athens and at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She completed her Postgraduate Degree in Media Arts and Film at the Academy of Media Arts of Cologne. In her practice, images are considered as visual documents of stories and places that have the potential to be renegotiated and reconfigured. Displacement, shift and a poetic transfer are constitutive parts of her approach.
Such journeys take the form of sequences of images, words and objects that unfold in spatial installations to reveal alienated narrations. Past and present seem to coincide where specific times and place allocations drift apart. A geological narrative often runs parallel to a sociohistorical one. This narrative is also rooted in a physical engagement of the artist with the actual places. In 2011 Christofides co-represented Cyprus at the 54th Venice Biennale.
Marianna Christofides has received numerous grants and scholarships, among them are Academy of the Arts of the World Colgne, Hartware Kunstverein, DAAD, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Kunststiftung NRW, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Imhoff Stiftung, Jean-Claude Reynal Foundation, Onassis Foundation and was shortlisted for the Deste Prize Athens. In 2014 she was holder of the Villa Aurora Grant in Los Angeles.
Residencies include: Atelier Galata, Istanbul (2015); Light Cone, Paris (2015); IASPIS, Stockholm (2014); Villa Aurora, Los Angeles (2014); Gasworks / TrAIN Residency, London (2013).
Recent solo exhibitions: Parkfield Studies, Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2017); Perennial Limbo, Waterside contemporary, London (2016); Shelter Cove, Annaelle Gallery, Stockholm (2016); Of(f) the Ground, Kunstraum Fuhrwerkswaage, Cologne (2015); But see, even that is only appearance, basis, Frankfurt (2015); Here let me stand, Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin (2014); Cinema Aurora, miart 2013, Milano International Art Fair with Laveronica art contemporanea (2013); l’histoire d’histoire d’une histoire, Kölnischer Kunstverein OG2, Cologne (2013); Reluctantly Real, Laveronica arte contemporanea, Modica, Sicily (2012); Errant Images, Omikron Gallery, Nicosia (2012).
Group exhibitions include: Uncertain States, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2016); The Equilibrists, Benaki Museum, Athens (2016); 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art; Between the Pessimism of the Intellect and the Optimism of the Will (2015); Multiplicities, Art Seen, Nicosia (2015); Physis, Annaelle Gallery, Stockholm (2014); Recorded Memories, Benaki Museum, Athens (2015) Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Nicosia (2014) CER Modern, Ankara (2014) National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (2014) Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (2013) Museum für Photographie Braunschweig (2013); Archaeologies of the Future 2, Galerie Campagne Première, Berlin (2013); Afresh, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2013); Dear Aby Warburg, What can be done with images?, Museum of Contemporary Art, Siegen (2013); Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße, Kunsthalle Bremen (2012); Sense of Place, BOZAR, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2012).
