Using Old Cypriot Schoolbooks, Marina Kassianidou Reveals ‘A Partial History’
For years, Marina Kassianidou has worked with 19th and 20th-century Cypriot schoolbooks from her late grandmother’s collection. To date, she has reproduced eight of the original texts, which are written in an old form of Greek and span topics including history, geography, religion, and economics. However, for her solo show A Partial History, at NARS Foundation, the artist has focused on markings in the books. As visitors circulate through the room, donning white gloves to handle the four artist’s books on display surrounded by large-scale drawings on paper it feels like stepping into a rare book library—it is a reverent experience.
Kassianidou’s books are not facsimiles or translations, rather the artist “re-reads” each text as a material object, focusing on the thousands of marks made by usage and time: notes, folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations, and wormholes. She then traces around each mark by hand, one page at a time, and scans, prints, and binds her drawings into a series of simple black artist’s books, true to the original texts’ dimensions.
For Kassianidou, mark-making serves as a fundamental communication mode and a declaration of existence. Her practice of tracing, which both affirms and effaces the artist’s hand, is inherently relational, exploring the dynamic between hand and surface; self and other; between past, present, and future. In studying the subtle traces of her elders’, the artist bears witness to the past through thumbed pages, looping script, and the incidents and accidents of their holding and handling. By tracing their marks and making them visible through her touch, Kassianidou asserts her presence, her contemporary “re”marks, creating an intergenerational collaboration with her ancestors. This collaboration extends to visitors handling Kassianidou’s books who leave their traces in an accretive and quietly performative continuation of marking. .
Hanging above the artist’s books are four high-resolution photographs, images depicting interior spreads from the original texts in Kassianidou’s family collection. These images are our only window into the source for A Partial History. The photos have a haptic quality, displaying in sharp detail the lines of Greek text and small marks the artist has pored over for endless hours. One image depicts the first page of a crumbling history of Cyprus, one of the first books in Greek ever published on the topic. Another opens to a history of the world, told in 248 pages in the year 1882.
The photos expose the physical decay of once-important knowledge published during a critical period in Cyprus, when nationalist identities were promoted through local education, with lasting effects on the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot populations who live in the divided country today. Now tattered artifacts, precious to their inheritor only for their proximity to her ancestors, the books bear histories that are constantly being rewritten. In choosing not to display more of the original texts, Kassianidou is intentional in how she reconstitutes new forms of knowledge through the addition of her volumes to the family archive.
Across from the texts are a series of new works: four large paper drawings, furled, map-like scrolls over 80 inches in length. One hangs from the wall, while others are arranged on the floor horizontally or vertically, standing over 50 inches tall. They are made through a time-intensive process in which Kassianidou projects pages of the tracings in her artist’s books onto a wall, at ten times magnification, and begins to layer pages on top of each other. One page at a time, she first traces all of the collective marks from each book’s even-numbered pages onto one side of the paper, and then all of the marks from the odd-numbered pages onto the reverse side. The result is one double-sided drawing per book, an intense compression of time and space made visible through accumulated graphite lines that subtly suggest topographies.
The large paper drawings are sculptural, appearing like columns in the space, toppled and upright, etched with fine lines. Standing and prone, the pieces also evoke the pillars of the artist’s family, the progenitors of A Partial History whose existences are otherwise sensed metonymically through their books. Viewers encounter these works through movement, “reading” them as they reposition their bodies in space. The original texts are unrecognizable, rendered as their most basic element: a single page. Folded in on themselves like shy neighbors, the works keep their secrets and offer only glimpses.
Such glimpses reverberate throughout the exhibition, as Kassianidou reminds us that every history can only be partial. Here, the artist is also a curator, consciously choosing what to reveal and what to obscure, pointedly telling a story through lacunae, through traces of objects and individuals who are not present. Through a call and response with the material history of her ancestors, Kassianidou invites viewers to carry forward the refrain. We are left pondering the evolution of the work, when future descendants may respond to it, and author their volumes.
A Partial History by Marina Kassianidou is on view at NARS Foundation through May 15, 2024. An artist talk with Mary Annunziata and catalogue launch will take place on Wednesday, May 15, from 6-8pm.
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