Athens-based artist Marina Xenofontos will represent Cyprus at the 2026 Venice Biennial.
Titled “It rests to the bones,” the pavilion will be curator by Kyle Dancewicz, deputy director of SculptureCenter in New York. For this edition, the Cyprus Pavilion will be housed at the Associazione Culturale Spiazzi, near the Arsenale.
Xenofontos, who was born in Limassol, Cyprus, in 1988, is known for a sculptural practice that spans found objects, kinetic sculptures, and film. Her work often deals Cyprus’s history and culture, specifically the legacy of British occupation of the island, which lasted nearly a century. She has previously shown at the Cyprus Pavilion, as part of a group exhibition, titled “The Future of Colour” and curated by Jan Verwoert, for the 2017 Biennale.
A description for the pavilion describes the artist as making “artworks that store and retrieve information. Her works across media are entries into and products of what the artist has called an ‘unconditional archive,’ or an accumulation of interrelated ideas, fragments of political memory, physical objects, and social conditions that undergird the present.”
Commissioned by Cyrpus’s Department of Contemporary Culture of the Deputy Ministry of Culture, the pavilion was subjected to an Open Call, which received 21 proposals. Xenofontos’s project was selected by a five-person advisory committee that included Louli Michaelidou, Gabriel Koureas, Catherine Nikita, Nikos Pattichis, and Polys Peslikas.
In a “Selection Rationale” statement, the advisory committee said, “The committee found the fully-fledged proposal as not only engaging with pertinent issues of the difficult times we live in, but also bringing to the surface Cypriot micro-histories within a global context. The installation of sculptures, video and sound delves into issues of personal and cultural memory with special emphasis on the power of folk traditions and heritage, to challenge established social norms, structures and conventions.”
This is not the first time that Xenofontos and Dancewicz have worked together. In 2023, Dancewicz organized a solo exhibition for Xenofontos at SculptureCenter, which featured several commissioned works. Among them was the video NEW FAITHFUL (2023), which drew from archival imagery from the UK-based Hellenic TV, including documentation of the Lemon Dance, a competition in which couples slow dance as they hold a lemon between their foreheads, with the last standing couple being declared the winner. The practice was “carried over by refugees and migrants from Cyprus to the United Kingdom and the United States in the years since the 1974 conflict and partition of the island in the postcolonial period of the 1970s and 1980s (still unresolved),” according to an exhibition description.
In addition to the SculptureCenter show, she has had solo shows at the Kunstverein Gartenhaus in Vienna (in 2025), the Kunstverein Hamburg (2024), and the Camden Arts Centre in London (2023), and was featured in the 2024 Baltic Triennial and the 2025 group exhibition “In a Bright Green Field,” organized by the New Museum and the DESTE Foundation and staged at the Benaki Museum in Athens.
“Marina Xenofontos is an artist whose work grapples with the weight and the lightness of history,” Dancewicz told ARTnews in an email. “Her Venice presentation will offer views of both the tough, mechanical side of her practice and the restrained, evanescent touch that spans different contexts and bodies of work. It will be a significant moment that builds upon her recent major exhibitions in Europe and the US.”
