Perennial Limbo by Marianna Christofides

About

Perennial Limbo is a portrait of the artist’s late father, consisting of some 400 cardboard sheets cut out by hand and held together with metal clamps. Each piece contains a manuscript fragment transferred from the subject’s diaries – here obscured and inaccessible lest the representation be disassembled.
Part of the cardboard head appears to be missing – repurposed by the artist in another work, where it serves as a topographical feature.

Working primarily in installation, film and text, Christofides studies the multiplicity of images that form consensus and collective memories, treating each as an imaginary document. Her collection of moments, objects, places and physical experiences – sometimes brought into gallery spaces wholesale, sometimes represented in poetic imagery - creates an illusion of traveling through a familiar yet fictitious world. Events can unravel at geological speeds, and whole lifetimes appear in singular objects.

Marianna Christofides co-represented Cyprus at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Her recent solo exhibitions include Basis Frankfurt, and Kölnischer Kunstverein, and group presentations at Akademie der Künste Berlin, Halle 14 Leipzig, 5th Thessaloniki Biennale, Benaki Museum Athens, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Kunsthalle Bremen. 
She is a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including Hartware Kunstverein, DAAD, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Akademie der Künste der Welt Cologne, Villa Aurora Los Angeles, Iaspis Stockholm, Kölnischer Kunstverein Imhoff Stiftung, and Onassis Foundation. She trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Athens, Slade School of Fine Art, and Academy of Media Arts Cologne.