Biennale Arte 2024
Lower Levant Company (LLC), founded by Emiddio Vasquez and Peter Eramian, is a collaborative project investigating Cyprus’s geopolitical and economic entanglements across the Levant and beyond. Taking the historical Levant Company as a reference for early capitalist trade between the British, Venetians, and the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century, the project traces how those structures continue to organise power and capital in the region today. The addition of ‘Lower’ reorients the company’s historical ambitions toward material and political regrounding, attentive to land, subterranean layers, and present-day extractive processes. LLC challenges westernising narratives that frame Cyprus as peripheral to Europe, instead situating the island within the interconnected cultural and political histories of its region. By recontextualising these colonial and financial inheritances, the project examines how Cyprus’s position between continents shapes contemporary politics, economies, and imaginaries, while staying committed to collaboration and doing work politically rather than making political work.
Haig Aivazian (b. 1980, Beirut) is an artist living in Beirut. Working across a range of media and modes of address, he delves into the ways in which power embeds, affects and moves people, objects, animals, landscape and architecture. Aivazian explores apparatuses of control and sovereignty in sports, museums, the office, music and anywhere else they may be at work.
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Endrosia was established in 2018 as an artist-run project space by Alexandros Xenophontos. Since 2021, Endrosia has been operating as a collective of seven practitioners (Andreas Andronikou, Marina Ashioti, Niki Charalambous, Doris Mari Demetriadou, Irini Khenkin, Rafailia Tsiridou, Alexandros Xenophontos) bringing together a wide spectrum of disciplines through cross-functional processes across exhibitions, spatial activations, printed matter and performance.
The collective is named after a Cypriot phrase that expresses a sense of relief prompted by a cool breeze, a ‘drosia’ that haphazardly seeps through the humidity that is characteristic of our climate. A breeze makes itself felt, be it arbitrarily, even in the most asphyxiating temperatures; a reminder that humidity is not always impenetrable.
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