Kassialos: from light to shadow

The Costas Argyrou Museum Foundation, with the institutional sponsorship of the Deputy Ministry of Culture, presents the exhibition "Cassialos: from Light to Shadow " at the exhibition spaces of the Costas Argyrou Museum in Mazotos from 11 July to 31 December 2024. The exhibition, which is curated by Catherine Louis Nikita, takes place on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and highlights the legacy of the Naif painter Michael Kasialos. With a strong anthropocentric character, the exhibition aims to draw our attention to this tragic moment in our history, when the life of a man and the work of an exceptional artist come to an abrupt halt, giving way to a void. The tragic and sudden end of this artist is the echo of an entire village, an entire region, an entire suffering country that for 50 years has not forgotten and is still trying to heal its wounds.

The exhibition brings together a selection of iconic works by Kasialos, which belong to the State Collection of Cypriot Art and other museums, institutions and institutions, as well as to private collectors, who kindly donated them for the occasion. The narrative is enriched with works by other artists of his era (Renos Evryviadis Wideson and Costas Averkiou) and numerous photographic, video and audio documents of the period, as well as other objects, in order to introduce the visitor to the whirlwind and the devastating impact of the violent incidents on the community of Assia, but also on the tragedy of the whole of Cyprus.

Unraveling the tangle of creation from 1974 to the present day, the fusion of works by three artists who come from the same village - Kyriakos Kasialos (son of Michael Kasialos), Klitsa Antoniou (who was born in Assia before the invasion) and Vassilia Anaxagoros (born years later in 1974 to a refugee family) - captures exactly the impact of the collective trauma. This trauma persists through three generations, metaphorically recalling the passage from light to shadow, encapsulating a human tragedy, as well as a cultural catastrophe, that have left unhealed wounds in the Cypriot collective memory.