The exhibition refers both to the name of the gallery and to one of the most significant historical natural resources of Cyprus. The project develops a reflection on the relationship between matter, landscape, and cultural memory, constructing a space suspended between the blue horizon of the sea and sky and the earthy tones of the land’s surface. Within this field of shifting surfaces and chemical reactions, processes of oxidation, corrosion, and crystallization acquire particular importance, revealing matter not as passive substance but as dynamic and marked by temporality. Material transformation thus becomes both a physical and an epistemological process.
In the context of Cyprus, copper also remains a crucial reference point—a rawmaterial that has been linked to the island’s history for millennia. This metal, long associated with the symbolism of light and transformation, forms a dense network of
geological, technological, and cultural references rooted in the long tradition of its extraction. In the installation it appears in the form of copper powder, sheets of metal, and intensely colored copper compounds, which together constitute the material environment of the work and emphasize the processual character of the transformations taking place within it.
Drawing on contemporary discourses at the intersection of art and science—often framed within the so-called “new humanities”—the project treats artistic practice as a speculative form of research. Objects and materials function here as carriers of latent memory, capable of articulating histories that extend beyond conventional textual narratives. Metal, metal leaf, paper, photography, objects, and video operate as layered testimonies to processes unfolding on both geological and historical timescales, while simultaneously reflecting the conditions of the contemporary moment.
At the same time, the installation examines the mechanisms through which knowledge about the world is produced and legitimized. Images and texts are not understood here as neutral carriers of truth but as operative structures that actively construct regimes of meaning. By juxtaposing references to Cypriot mythology with both authentic and fabricated photographs of recognizable places, the work destabilizes the evidentiary status traditionally attributed to visual documentation.
Cartographic outlines of the island, drawn from maps produced in different historical periods, further reveal the extent to which representations of territory depend on the epistemological frameworks and technologies that generate them. The installation therefore does not seek to verify the truthfulness of images or narratives; rather, it asks how truth itself becomes legible and how certain representations acquire the authority to define reality.
Artists: Anna Krukowska, Alicja Panasiewicz, Tomasz Dobiszewski, Adama Panasiewicz
