Maria Loizidou

Loizidou studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon from 1976 to 1981. After living in Paris, she settled in Nicosia, developing a practice across drawing, sculpture, video and installations. In 1986 she represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale with The Myth of Ariadne in Three Acts. Work with architecture and public space broadened her interest in the relationships between people, objects and their surroundings.

Her collaboration with AA+U For Architecture, Art and Urbanism encouraged exchanges between disciplines. Museum projects in Greece connected that research with distinct collections and settings: Living Small at the Benaki Museum in 2008, Collective Autobiography at EMST in 2013, A Transfer at Kerameikos in 2015 and Déshabillé at the Mentis textile centre in 2017. Later, The Place I Am Not was presented at the Freud Museum and the Hellenic Centre in London in 2024. These encounters make the site an active part of the work. Her comments about everyday action place patient, repeated gestures alongside large questions of memory and social experience. The career links Cyprus’s contemporary art with Greek institutions and international conversations through sustained research and collaboration.

The Myth of Ariadne in Three Acts, 1986, was an early video installation in her international exhibition career. Collective Autobiography, 2013, reconstructed an early twentieth-century cypress wardrobe inside out, revealing compartments with her archive, sculptures, drawings, video and notebooks. EMST presented it at the Athens Conservatoire. The installation and its related publication belong to a shared inquiry into experience, memory and the reading of a place.

A Transfer, 2015, brought knitted stainless-steel forms into the Kerameikos museum and archaeological site. Fine metal thread gave apparent softness to a durable material. The work connected repeated handwork with collective labour and the site’s funerary gestures; its interpretation of the ancient handshake was the artist’s contemporary response. Déshabillé, 2017, engaged the Mentis centre’s textile history through the relationship between clothing, making and daily use. The Place I Am Not, 2024, worked across two London venues to explore belonging and migration through objects and spaces associated with Freud’s life. Across these projects, fragile appearance and physical strength remain in conversation. Their forms depend on gestures, shared work and attention to the meanings carried by materials.

Greek-language interviews and museum records provide practical ways into her work. A Transfer connects contemporary Cypriot art with an Athenian archaeological setting; the Mentis project links it with textile labour. Her Greek statement about everyday action makes the small repeated gesture a useful starting point.

Take a piece of soft thread, tie a simple knot and untie it. Use the passage’s model «Έδεσα έναν κόμπο και τον έλυσα». Then compare νήμα as a material with «το νήμα της ιστορίας», the connecting thread of a story. Write one Greek sentence for each meaning. B1 describes this supported Modern Greek activity, which joins handwork, past-tense verbs and a common figurative expression.

• She represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale in 1986.
• A Transfer used knitted stainless-steel thread at Kerameikos.
• Collective Autobiography was shown by EMST at the Athens Conservatoire in 2013.