A Time of Living In Between

Short Summary

A Time of Living in Between investigates how lived experience unfolds within the border zones of Cyprus’s divided territories, revealing hybrid formations of memory and identity shaped by reconstruction, fragmentation, and the limits of visual perspective.

Concept

Developed through fieldwork across both the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-occupied North, the project traces how historical conflict persists not only through official narratives, but through architectural residues, environmental textures, and everyday social routines. In the wake of the Turkish invasion of 1974, the island’s bordered division has produced a landscape in which compounding post-colonial legacies, religious ideologies, and latent geopolitical agendas intersect, in complex ways the level of daily life.

Rather than locating agency in fixed identities or political positions, the work attends to emergent processes of rebuilding, adaptation, and hybridisation. Acts of reconstruction, whether sanctioned or improvised, are understood as sites where memory is both preserved and transformed, and where the scars of violence coexist with pragmatic strategies for inhabiting the present.

The installation is structured around multiple, outward-facing viewpoints that refuse a singular or stable perspective. Discongruent camera angles generate spatial tension, oscillating between panoramic observation and performative framing. From their position as outsider-visitors, the artists acknowledge the limits of their own gaze, allowing perceptual failure to become a method. What emerges is a fragmented, kaleidoscopic account of everyday atmospheres that resists closure.

By foregrounding the instability of visual authority, the work questions the normative assumptions of representation and documentation. Viewers are invited to reflect on how collective identities are constructed through acts of looking, and what is rendered invisible, excluded, or unspeakable in the process.

A Time of Living in Between is a collaborative project between Leonard Maassen and Rafael Kuhn. We would like to thank Maria-Christina Achilleoude, Christos Ioannou and all of our anonymous field contributors in assisting with the realisation of this project.