EXHIBITIONS
Above: Gallery of images from the 2013 exhibition Response to Cyprus: Artists at the Paphos Theatre Excavation. The event was hosted by the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (AAIA) at the Centre of Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA). Photo credits are as shown.
Response to Cyprus: Artists at the Paphos Theatre Excavation / 2013
In 2013, The Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (AAIA) hosted an exhibition titled Response to Cyprus: Artists at the Paphos Theatre Excavation at the Centre of Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA) from 10 July to 1 December. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Craig Barker and Professor Diana Wood Conroy, and was formally opened on 10 July 2013 by Consul of the High Commission of Cyprus in Canberra, Andreas Hadjithemistos.
Response to Cyprus: Artists at the Paphos Theatre Excavation was the result of a visit by a group of nine artists from the University of Wollongong Senior Artists' Research Forum (SARF) who visited Nea Paphos in Cyprus in 2010 during an excavation fieldwork season. The project represented the culmination of eighteen years of collaborations between artists in Wollongong and archaeologists at the University of Sydney and its Nicholson Museum.
A wide range of photographic and illustrative works were displayed in this exhibition, including works by Jacqueline Gothe, Derek Kreckler, Jacky Redgate, Diana Wood Conroy, Lawrence Wallen, Deborah Pollard and Tim Maddock.
The Senior Artists' Research Forum, co-ordinated by Professor Diana Wood Conroy, offered leading artists at UoW the opportunity to develop a research project that reflected on their existing body of work in order to achieve a PhD or Doctor of Creative Arts degree (DCA) within 12 to 36 months. SARF worked on the Paphos excavation in October 2010 in order to understand a wider parameter for their research, in an island with a highly developed archaeological and art history as well as a postcolonial focus on a bitter past.
This exhibition is a parallel group of contemporary artworks to those that were concurrently on show in the exhibition Aphrodite’s Island: Australian Archaeologists in Cyprus, at the Nicholson Museum, The University of Sydney.
The Art of Archaeology: Response to Cyprus, 2013, Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens Bulletin 10: p.34.