Maria Toumazou: Half Frame

Under the leadership of new Director Paula Kommoss, the Overbeck-Gesellschaft’s program will commence with the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by Cypriot artist Maria Toumazou.

In Half Frame, Toumazou utilises the mechanisms of photographic image-making as a methodology to (re)develop new and earlier work. The title of the exhibition refers to the half-frame camera design that came to prominence in the early 1960s, transforming photography by halving the size of each frame on a standard 35mm film roll, effectively doubling the number of exposures for the same cost. On one hand, this doubling set in motion the intensification of photographic representation. On the other, it can also be understood as a harbinger of the drive towards continuous technical progress, and the cascade of fragmented, decentralized and hyper-referential images that characterize our mediatised present. Across the exhibition, Toumazou references three-dimensional modes of image construction and capture, forming an optical experience that is ephemeral, partial, fleeting. For the artist, these allegories of vision might also function as reparative forms of knowledge.

Half Frame extends to a second location, St. Petri zu Lübeck, where sculptures appropriate and reinterpret pre-existing objects, including the canon of a bell from a church in Nicosia, Cyprus, its tentacular form enlarged to human scale; “Emily”, “Midea“ and “Serpa“ brand fans that, denuded of their blades, mimic surveillance apparatuses; and the remnants of a set of deadstock dinner plates bearing the image of an aspirational cityscape, sourced from a shop in Nicosia’s old town. Just as myths cycle through cultures, branded goods also circulate through the global economy.

As a whole, Toumazou’s exhibition tests a series of scenes in which memory, affect and perception function simultaneously, crafting a recursive choreography that hints at the future that never was. In turn, she proposes a viewpoint from which to survey the detritus of technological and cultural optimism; a parade of half frames.

Curated by Paula Kommoss.