Panayiotou's work spans a wide range of media, including sculpture, painting, installation, performance, photography, and video, and focuses on uncovering hidden narratives in the visual and material records of history and time.
[1] Drawing from his training in dance and the performing arts, as well as his studies in history and theatre anthropology, the artist’s work often involves the re-contextualisation of found materials and performance-based interventions.
Through this selection of images, often depicting locals dressed up as Disney characters, the artist explores how the long-established purist narrative of tradition typically used to describe the annual celebration is being increasingly affected by processes of Westernisation and Americanisation.
The works were produced by infiltrating a pre-existing commercial circuit of production of religious icons, commissioning an iconographer to deploy the customary Byzantine techniques.
[10] Bringing forward the golden background as the sole element in the painting, the artist abstracted any form of representation associated with Orthodox iconography.
[10] As such, the works take as their point of departure the commodification and commercialisation of Byzantine iconography and plays into iconoclastic historical impulses—a recurring war on icons.
From 2019 onwards, the series has expanded to include traditional silversmithing and gilding techniques used in the creation of revetments—metal covers that conceal and protect religious icons.
[10] These small fragments were kept in the Archaeological Museum in Nicosia, and, with the collaboration of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities, Panayiotou borrowed them as material for the composition of his wall mosaics.
[13] For this work, Panayiotou documented the mauvaises herbes, or weeds, that grow on the surface of these in-filled archaeological digs, and rendered them on a 1:1 scale as a contemporary mosaic, adopting the same tessellation techniques used to create the antiquities buried beneath them.
[13] The act of concealing an image that was made to be displayed on stage involves an abandonment of narrative,[13] evoking feelings of disenchantment and disillusionment towards theatrical traditions.
[20] Originally, new chapters of Dying on Stage were only presented to friends on the artist’s birthday, however, following an invitation to present it publicly at Serpentine Galleries' Park Nights[19] and in Stromboli, Italy by Fiorucci Art Trust,[21] different versions have been performed in numerous festivals and institutions over the past decade, amongst which are: Festival d’Automne, Paris, France;[22] Festival La Bâtie, Geneva, Switzerland;[23] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, Belgium;[24] PERFORMA 15, New York, US; Centre National de la Dance (C ND), Paris, France (on invitation by Jerôme Bel); Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece;[25] Atelier des Ballets de Monte Carlo at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France;[26] Phenomenon, Anafi, Greece;[27] Sharjah Biennial 13 Act II, STATION, Beirut, Lebanon;[28] Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, Switzerland; and Conway Hall, London, UK, presented by Camden Arts Centre in collaboration with Serpentine Galleries.
[36] The space has featured exhibitions by Pierre Leguillon,[37] Apostolos Georgiou,[38] Eileen Myles,[39] Eric Baudelaire,[40] Koula Savvidou,[41] Jumana Manna,[42] Kara Walker,[43] Thraki Rossidou Jones,[44] Constantin Brancusi,[45] Farah Al Qasimi[46] and Pratchaya Phinthong,[47] among others.
Initially, The Island Club was hosted on the ground floor of the artist’s studio, located in Agora Anexartisias — a shopping arcade built in 1991 in the commercial centre of Limassol.
[62] To accompany Kunz's works, he created new stone benches from the healing rock AION A which acted as scopic devices from which visitors could contemplate the drawings.