21.03.2025 \\ 24.05.2025
Fondazione Morra Greco is pleased to announce Eternal, Returns, the first institutional solo exhibition in Italy by Cypriot artist Marina Xenofontos, running from March 21-May 24, 2025. Featuring existing and newly produced works by the artist, the exhibition spreads across the decorated salons of the first floor of Palazzo Caracciolo di Avellino, the headquarters of the Fondazione.
Eternal, Returns hints at the manifold, layered, and covered strata of the architecture and decor of Fondazione Morra Greco’s spaces, by entangling physical manifestations of concepts like time, history, and memory, each with its own poetics, ideological implications, and repetitions. Using a vocabulary that merges light, movement, and matter, Xenofontos dwells on the conceptual and embodied experience of an unconditional archive.
The juxtaposition between the venue’s lavish decorations – by painter Giacomo del Pò, celebrating the Caracciolo and Carafa families – and Xenofontos’ Code of Construction (2024), referencing the postcolonial design of Cypriot bedrooms furnishing, creates an encounter between public and private codings of the personal, evoking the familial complex as a form of industrialization.
Through spatial endeavours that isolate vernacular objects from the domestic realm, Xenofontos brings historical, social, and ideological constraints to the fore. These play out in elements and symbols that become living bodies concentrated and charged with multiple meanings. Latent significances, inscribed in the objects and architecture, activate alternative readings beyond their usual or conventionally assigned functions, investigating how private stories are shaped in “official” narratives of history and – vice versa – how the social spills into the individual.
A series of Xenofontos’ works, beginning with Data Storage of a True Spectrum (2022), condense systemic failures into sculpture, transforming obsolete technologies like CD-ROM – broken pieces of empty information – into kinetic machines that reflect spectrums and (sun)light. The effect of light is also central in the installation Carousel, which shows an archive of weathered curtains, taken from Xenofontos’ rooms between 2001 and the present, with traces of windows from past architectures, the passing of time marked into the material. In the film archive We Were Supposed to Have Fun (2011-ongoing), time feeds an ever-expanding accumulation of differing cultural environments, from brothel houses to churches, philosophy lectures to techno parties.
Eternal, Returns also raises questions of salvage and discarded objects, such as in Over the Coop at Sunset, Multiple Scoliosis, and a Nest of Vicious Echinoderms and Propagandists, a Collection of Failed Memories Appeared Either Erupted by a Junction Box, or was Caused by Debris from the Classic Firework Show. It was too Beautiful to be Real, (2021). An assembled and disfigured puzzle featuring the Neuschwanstein castle, the work’s fable-like image, scraped and deformed with time, casts a shadow in the form of a coded story of labour, power, and control – a shadow also cast against the painted lands and possessions of the Caracciolo family depicted in the final room of the exhibition spaces.
Marina Xenofontos’ modified vernacular objects, riddled with polyvocal significances, offer glimpses of everyday life, innervating both the fable with the real and the real with the imagined.
The exhibition is co-financed with funds from Piano Strategico Cultura e Turismo 2024/2025 – Progetto Global Forum Mostre d’arte contemporanea EDI 2024 of the Campania Region.
With the support of the Henry Moore Foundation and the Republic of Cyprus, Deputy Ministry of Culture.
With the patronage of the Embassy of Cyprus in Rome.
Artist bio
Marina Xenofontos (1988, Limassol, Cyprus) lives and works in Athens, Greece.
Recent solo exhibitions include View From Somewhere Near at Kunstverein in Hamburg (2024); Public Domain at Camden Art Centre in London (2023); In Practice at SculptureCenter in New York (2023); Carousel at AKWA IBOM in Athens (2022); I don’t sleep, I dream at The Island Club in Limassol (2021).
She is the recipient of the Frieze Emerging Artist Award 2022 and recently participated in the 15th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania.
