Nasia Papavasiliou

Delineate

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Exhibition from November 10th to November 24th, 2023

 

Curator: Gonzalo Morales Leiva

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In the profound being of Nasia Papavasiliou, in the zone of mystery, two forces reveal themselves. They seem opposing, fertile, pulsating. Separation, a will to unify.

 

Both culturally and personally, she has experienced grief as a line that extends and separates, straining the relationship of a here that is alive and a there that is absent, dead. She has directed her attention to the in-between of separated fragments. Something draws her to the ground, to the crevices where the earth prepares minerals, liquids, explosions for years.

 

In her artwork, Nasia connects with natural found materials. Salt, soil, clay, water. Through simple actions, she enters states of higher consciousness. The extensive and slow temporality of nature contrasts with her human time frame performances, gestures that start and end by pressing a button on her camera, a circular red button.

 

Fascinated by experiencing these materials in their pure states, she left the city of Berlin to immerse herself in the Atacama Desert of Chile. In the salty aridity of this vast expanse of land, in the abyssal presence of the sky and its constellations, she reconnects with simple and small fragments. This time, the desert space reveals its intrinsic connections, the in-between of separated segments is no longer empty; it never was.

 

Delineate as an exhibition is a workfield that resonates in the viewer, touching the same fiber that the artist felt touched, the one that compelled her to bring her body to the ground to listen. The main hall of Vorfluter contains videos showcasing performative experiences executed in the desert, pages from a notebook, a fabric with the imprints of a dry river, and a sound installation. In the basement, the artist constructs a floor with clay, soil, and salt to perform extended acts where she destroys and builds new spaces from the same materiality, revealing that beneath the earth‘s surface lies a hidden vitality that gestates universes at a slow pace.

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Nasia Papavasiliou (1993) is a Cypriot Artist, graduate of MA in Performance: Design and Practice (CSM London).

Using mainly raw materials, her works carry a poetic and imaginative sensibility translated through performance, sculptural scenography and audio visual installations.

Informed by fieldwork research, her practice looks into the notion of “land” both as a geological and discursive environment.

From both a physical and metaphysical vantage point, she intricately weaves together nature and geographies with the nuances of grief - drawing parallels to the cosmic expanse to embrace the divides and complexities between multiple realities of time.

Her recent works were shown at the Prague Quadrennial ‘23, Glogauair, Barbican Centre’s gardens and she’s undertaken artist residencies in Chile, Berlin and more.