the comeback /

There was a time when this website had a blog, I then deleted it, Not because I had run out of things to say (trust me, this never happens!),  but because I felt I hadn't yet found the way I wanted to say them. Since then, life has unfolded in ways I could not have anticipated. There have been exhibitions, performances, research, classrooms, conversations, failures, moments of uncertainty, and moments that reminded me exactly why I make art in the first place. Somewhere along the way, I realised I had been documenting everything except the thinking behind it. so this is my return. my comeback.  this wont work as a space of sharing finished projects, but another opening to a door of process… the questions that stay with me long after an exhibition closes, the books that reshape the way I think, the places that leave traces, the performances that resist documentation, and the conversations that continue long after they end. I don't know exactly what this space will become, and I think that's the point.

Some posts will be about art. Others about research, memory,  teaching, performance, or the quiet moments in between that somehow end up shaping the work more than the obvious ones do If you've found your way here, thank you for reading. Here's to beginning again.

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From the opening on “notes on staying” / April 2026, stand in line gallery, nicosia

the Silence After the Applause

A few weeks have passed since my solo exhibition, Notes on Staying, came to an end. There is something inherently violent in exhibiting one's work. For almost a year, the exhibition quietly occupied my mind. My entire life. Who I was. It was not something I was preparing for. It became the way I experienced time. Every conversation, every book I picked up, every journey, every moment of doubt somehow found its way back into the studio. Looking back now, I realise the exhibition became a representation of where I was, mentally, physically, spiritually. Even before I knew that was what I was making.  The opening came and went almost too quickly. It was everything I could have hoped for. The gallery was full, people stayed, returned, shared conversations that have remained with me long after the exhibition closed. Watching someone spend time with a work you have lived with for some time now is a strange experience. You stand nearby, pretending not to listen, but every word somehow reaches you.  What I was not prepared for was the feeling of exposure. Despite the years of showing my work in public, this feeling remains utterly foreign.  I don't mean the obvious kind. As artists, we know that exhibiting means placing our work before others. We accept that people will like it, dislike it, ignore it, or question it. That has never frightened me. The exposure I am talking about is quieter than that. It happens when people begin telling you what your work is about. Throughout the exhibition, people spoke to me with incredible generosity. They saw things I had never consciously placed there. They connected the works to memories from their own lives, to loss, love, relationships, friendships, politics, family, migration, hope, grief. Some interpretations were close to where the work had begun, but others travelled somewhere entirely different.  I noticed something in myself during those conversations.  I wanted to explain because I wanted to hold on to the place from which the work had emerged. I wanted to tell them where an idea first appeared, what a material meant to me, why a work had found its way into a piece. Almost as though explaining the work would somehow protect it. Or perhaps protect me.  It made me wonder whether exhibiting is, above all, an act of letting go.  For months, the work belongs to you. It grows in the privacy of the studio, where no explanation is required. There are no labels, no questions, no prices, no expectations. Nothing. Only the act of making, changing your mind, beginning again. Then, suddenly, it belongs to everyone else.  Not literally, of course, but in another sense. People carry it away with them. They remember different details. They attach it to experiences you have never lived. They remember The Fool differently than you. The work continues existing in ways you can neither anticipate nor control. And perhaps that is what art has always done.  Maybe an artwork is never completed in the studio. Maybe it only begins there. It becomes something else each time another person encounters it, bringing with them a lifetime of memories, fears, desires and absences. The work remains physically unchanged, but somehow it is never the same twice.  I have been thinking about this a lot since the exhibition closed. I don't think it is because I am searching for the "correct" interpretation of Notes on Staying. I don't think one exists anymore. If anything, exposing myself taught me that meaning is far less stable than I once imagined.  What stays with me is not whether people understood the work as I intended. It is the realisation that, once shared, the work quietly stops belonging only to its maker. Maybe that is the real vulnerability of showing up, of taking up space. It has never been about being seen, but about accepting that your work will go on living a life that no longer includes your permission.  And then there is the silence.  It arrives only after months of intensity. After the conversations have ended, the walls have been emptied, and the work has found new homes in the memories of other people. It is a strange silence, because from the outside it looks like rest. But it does not always feel restful. Every time I expose myself through my work, something in me is emptied alongside it.  I have learned not to resist this feeling. It is not creative exhaustion in the ordinary sense. It is as though I have spent months translating parts of myself into material, into parts of staying, into objects that no longer belong to me. Once they leave, I am left with a version of myself I no longer quite recognise.  Perhaps this is why I always disappear for a while after an exhibition. Not to escape, but to become unfamiliar to myself again. To make room for new questions before searching for new answers. To read without looking for references. To travel without looking for metaphors. To return to the mundane of ordinary life, to washing clothes and cleaning up my closet, where ideas have the chance to arrive unnoticed.  This now is perhaps a part of that return. Not as a declaration that I know where I am going next, but as a place to inhabit the in-between. A room where thoughts can exist before they become artworks. Where uncertainty does not need to be resolved. Where I can slowly learn who I am after Notes on Staying, before whatever comes next.