Militarized Landscapes

In the Artist Talk, Cypriot artist Stelios Kallinikou and British writer Tom Seymour Evans talk about the (in) visibility of military presence using the example of Akrotiri in southern Cyprus, which is a British military base and at the same time an ecologically significant wetland.

In his photographs and films, Kallinikou has been exploring a landscape in which nature, military infrastructure and geopolitical interests come together for several years. Evans is also concerned with places of military power. For his book This Is Not An Exercise (The Bodley Head, 2027), he spent several years visiting testing grounds, training centers and military bases.

Together, Kallinikou and Evans talk about landscape as a venue for geopolitical negotiations and about how photography and writing can approach monitored, hard-to-reach or hidden places.

Stelios Kallinikou (*1985, Cyprus) is a visual artist whose work unfolds through photography, video and sound and creates introspective worlds that explore the intersections of politics, colonialism, environment, technology, spirituality, and the power of images. His speculative narratives question land and body as both territorial and ideological constructs. He is co-founder and director of the Thkio Ppalies Project Space in Nicosia, Cyprus, where he lives and works. His work has been exhibited extensively, including at Foam (Amsterdam), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), NiMac, (Nicosia) and the Benaki Museum (Athens), and has been seen at important biennials and in important institutions such as the Ural Industrial Biennial and the Baden-Baden State Art Gallery.

Tom Seymour Evans is a writer living between London and Berlin. In order to understand how current military mobilization is changing the world, he spent several years visiting test sites, training centers and military bases. His first book, This Is Not An Exercise, published by The Bodley Head in 2027, is about these experiences. He writes about contemporary literature and other topics for the Times Literary Supplement.