Hamburg, June 2025: A Time of Living in Between

The four-channel installation “A Time of Living in Between” was shown at June 2025 at ASA Open Studios, hosted by HfbK Hamburg (Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts) and Alfred Töpfer Foundation.

A collaboration between Rafael Kuhn and Leonard Maassen, A Time of Living in Between explores how memories of conflict are distributed in architectural, environmental, and social landscapes in Cyprus. Since the Turkish invasion in 1974, the island has been divided into two political administrations. Following milennia of empire-building, post-colonial independence from the British Empire in 1948 and the at the confluence of two world religions, inhabiting everyday worlds in this space is an active negotiation in the midst of latent struggles that transverse the horizon of immediate locality. Agency is relocated in emergent opportunities for (re)construction and the articulation of hybridities of memory and identity. The process of constant rebuilding because, or in spite, of geopolitical agendas is intertwined with the traces and scars of brutal conflict manifest in architectural structures and landscapes.

Situated at the confluence of four outward-looking views, the viewer is invited to reflect on the biases and limitations of their own gaze. Discongruent cameras angles perpetuate a sense of tension at the centre of the space, sitting uneasily between panoramic naturalism and explicit performativity. The artists, in their positionality as outsider-visitors, actively fail in their attempts to make sense of this charged space through a rigid application of perspective, instead emerging with a kaleidoscopic documentation of the unassuming atmospheres of everyday life. The installation draws the normative discrimination of the visual mode into question, and we are invited to creatively imagine what is rendered blank and written out of the visible in the process of creating collective identity.

Thank you to Maria-Christina Achilleoude, Christos Ioannou, HfbK Hamburg, Art School Alliance and Alfred Töpfer Stiftung in supporting this project, and to all the people who shared their perspectives with us.