Pavlos Ioannides
Kammokastra - NiMAC, Nicosia (Cyprus), 2025
cotton fabric, charcoal, steel tubes, galvanised steel tube connectors, stainless steel mirror, chain, sand, photograph (taken by the artists’ mother)
Approx. 320 x 330 x 340cm
exhibition views
Fluid Persistence
curated by Dr. Elena Stylianou
NiMAC - Nicosia, Cyprus
12.12.2025 - 31.05.2026
If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes. If we opened me up, we'd find beaches... Memory is like sand in my hand... - Agnés Varda
Ioannides's work explores memory as a shifting terrain: fragile, fluid, and endlessly reshaped. At its centre is the square, borrowed from archaeological excavation: a structure that attempts to impose order yet continually tilts, breaks, and reforms. Metal frameworks evoke construction and containment and echo systems of discipline, while the reflective surface of the mirror traverses our ways of seeing the work and ourselves within it, pushing back with sensuality and defiance. Charcoal frottages taken from the tiled floor of the artist's childhood home carry intimate traces of domestic life. Water flows across these structures, refusing containment and evoking a womb-like sense of suspension and trust. Birds, light and unpredictable, introduce a subtle, yet wild counter current. At the same time, the use of charcoal gathered from Cyprus's burned villages in the big fire of the summer of 2025, becomes both medium and memory, filling this “castle of sand” with fragments that invite us to drift, imagine, and rediscover grief and renewal.
text by Dr. Elena Stylianou
The works' title, Kammokastra (Καμμόκαστρα), is a neologism that combines multiple Greek words: καμμώ (in Cypriot Greek, the act of counting with closed eyes before searching in hide-and-seek), καμένο (“burnt”), άμμος (“sand”), and κάστρα (“castles”). Together, these elements evoke action, instability, construction, and destruction. Semantically, the word refers to something that looks solid but is unstable and already ruined beneath the surface - like a sandcastle: built, imagined, and destined to collapse. As a queer practice of linguistic invention and world-making, Kammokastra enacts a layered metaphor of pretence, fragility, and impermanence, where what appears firm is in fact precarious and already shifting away.
on the making of the work:
The creation of Kammokastra was a collaborative process with my family. My grandfather, a metalworker, helped construct the steel structure, while my grandmother assisted in sewing the fabric canvas. The photograph featured in the work, depicting me as a child, was taken by my mother. Their contributions were essential to bringing the piece to life.
Rien Faire Comme une Bête - AOA;87 gallery, Berlin (Germany), 2025
charcoal on cotton canvas, steel tubes, galvanised steel tube connectors, aluminium stretchers
variable dimensions (270 x 450cm)
exhibition views
Abyss of Absence
curated by Jonah Kittelmann
AOA;87 gallery Berlin
07.08?2025 - 06.09.2025
Rien faire comme une bête is a site-responsive installation that considers the wall as both an architectural structure and a condition experienced by the body. Composed of five stretched cotton canvas panels suspended from raw steel structures, the work divides the exhibition space into two interconnected rooms. While four panels form a continuous barrier, the fifth is detached and placed against the opposite wall, creating a narrow opening that invites the body to pass through.
The proportions of the panels are based on the scale of the concrete segments of the Berlin Wall. Together with the divided city of Nicosia, where I grew up, these references situate the work within personal and historical experiences of separation. Depending on the surrounding light, the cotton canvas alternately conceals and reveals the space beyond it, allowing bodies, shadows and the reverse of the drawings to become visible. A life-scale image of my own lower body, created in charcoal through a screen-printing process, suggests both movement and its impossibility.
The title, borrowed from Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia, evokes the possibility of existing outside the demands of productivity while suspended between liberation and paralysis. Through subtle gestures of separation and opening, the wall no longer appears as a fixed boundary but as a structure that can be crossed, displaced and reimagined.
Temporary Shelters in Every Residential Building - POSTA space, Sofia (Bulgaria), 2026
site-specific installation
cotton canvas, cotton bedsheet, family photographs, photographic negative, LED light, galvanized steel, photo album
curated by Boyana Dzhikova
Temporary Shelters in Every Residential Building is a site-specific installation developed for the street-facing vitrine of POSTA Space for Contemporary Art, situated within the ground floor of a residential building. Behind the vitrine, a staircase descends directly to the building's bomb shelters - spaces that have acquired renewed urgency in the context of contemporary conflicts. Instead of concealing this existing architecture, I incorporate it into the installation, allowing passers-by to glimpse a space that normally remains hidden from the street.
Layers of translucent and opaque cotton fabric are suspended like curtains, simultaneously concealing and revealing the space beyond them. A life-sized image of my lower body is screen-printed onto the fabric, while a handwritten narrative on a strip of developed photographic film hangs suspended in front of it. Along the staircase, I install a vertical arrangement of family photographs that I took during a month-long stay in Cyprus nearly a decade earlier. Glimpsed only through the narrow gaps between the hanging fabrics, the photographs remain only partially visible, inviting a slow and deliberate act of looking.
The installation unfolds through partial visibility rather than disclosure. By allowing only fragmentary views into the building's interior, it places passers-by in an ambiguous position between neighbour, visitor and voyeur. Looking, reading and remembering become intertwined as the installation reveals itself only through fragments, questioning what may be seen, what remains hidden, and who is granted access to intimate space.
Watermelon Tree - Zilberman Gallery Berlin, 2024
charcoal on cotton canvas
160 x 200cm
exhibition views
You say I have unlimited potential. I disagree.
curated by Lusin Reinsch
Zilbeman Gallery Berlin
19.07 - 24.08.2024
Playing with the absurdity of its title, Watermelon Tree explores a continuous tension between desire and withdrawal - between reaching for potential and resisting it. It proposes an impossibility, yet in doing so opens a space for imagination, for new ways of seeing, and for growth to emerge.
Working with charcoal on canvas - materials rooted in the history of fine art - the piece both engages with and challenges tradition. Drawing, historically positioned as preparatory to painting, takes center stage here, shifting from a subordinate role toward a more autonomous and expansive potential.
Watermelon Tree exists on the threshold between figuration and abstraction. Depth and complexity emerge through the accumulation and layering of interwoven forms. Echoes of nature, sound, language, and symbolic marks surface across the canvas, forming a dense composition shaped by tension: movement and stillness, lightness and weight, order and chaos.
Under the Blooming Sky
charcoal on cotton canvas
ongoing series (since 2024)
170 x 180cm each (last - 220 x 170cm)
Under the Blooming Sky is a series of charcoal drawings on unprimed canvas that explores movement through the relationship between charcoal and unmarked canvas. The drawings unfold through the tension between dense charcoal passages and expansive areas of blank fabric, where the surface becomes as active as the marks themselves.
The drawings resist fixed images. They suggest landscapes that are continuously becoming, remaining suspended between representation and abstraction. Rather than directing the drawing towards a predetermined composition, the process gradually gives way to uncertainty, allowing movement, rhythm and the physical qualities of charcoal to shape the work.
The title, Under the Blooming Sky, evokes the experience of moving beneath an open expanse, where the horizon remains both destination and promise. Rather than describing a specific place, the drawings remain suspended in a state of becoming.
Cruising Utopia - Studio Teile, Berlin, 2025
charcoal on cotton canvas
180 x 170cm
exhibition views
On Transformation
curated by Alix Weidner
Studio Teile Berlin
May 2025
Ioannides' painting “Cruising Utopia” - referring to José Esteban Muñoz’ book on queer theory, focuses on the fluidity and movement of forms. Using fairly limited means and a limited palette of colours (charcoal on uncoated canvas), he creates dynamic forms conveying an effect of constant movement. The dark shapes perhaps recall the water currents that surround the land where he grew up: the island of Cyprus? Sometimes, these forms are derived from signs and writing. Sometimes, too, they become almost troubling, oppressive masses, resembling walls. Others will see them as clouds or swarms: present but still difficult to grasp, ephemeral and in perpetual becoming.
text by Alix Weidner
The Wall - Villa Arson, Nice (France), 2023
steel tubes, galvanised steel tube connectors, carcoal, acrylic spray paint, stainless steel mirror, plastic zip ties, cotton fabric
400 x 380 x 30cm
2023
exhibition views
Ce qui nous oblige
curated by Sophie Lapalu
Villa Arson, Nice (France)
29.09.2023 - 28.01.2024
The Wall reimagines one of architecture's most familiar structures. Suspended charcoal drawings on cotton canvas compose a wall that is thin, translucent and permeable rather than heavy, opaque and fixed. Instead of separating space, it begins to reconfigure it, allowing images, bodies and light to pass through successive layers of drawing. In doing so, the work asks what a wall could become.
Spray-painted across one of the suspended canvases, the phrase Never Ending Story introduces writing as another form of drawing. Like an inscription left on an urban wall, it transforms the surface into a place where image, language and gesture intersect. A suspended mirror destabilizes the boundaries of the installation, drawing viewers, the surrounding architecture and neighbouring works into its constantly shifting reflections. As reflections appear and disappear, bodies become temporary traces within the work, while the installation continuously redraws its own limits through the presence of those who encounter it.
Conceived while reflecting on the divided city of Nicosia, the installation questions the wall not only as a political or architectural structure, but as a way of imagining relationships between bodies and space. By replacing solidity with fragility, opacity with transparency and separation with permeability, the work imagines architecture as something open to change, encounter and new ways of inhabiting space.
exhibition views from Ce qui nous oblige - Villa Arson, Nice (France), 2023
curated by Sophie Lapalu
29.09.2023 - 28.01.2024
from left to right:
Fly Fly my Little Shaking Heart
charcoal on cotton canvas
190 x 200cm
2023
Under a Thundering Bed I Hide
charcoal on cotton canvas (two panels)
320 x 200cm
2023
In Between Freedom and Must
charcoal on cotton canvas (two panels)
295 x 200cm
2023
This Is Not an Abstract World
charcoal on cotton canvas, primed with acrylic gesso
ongoing series (since 2023)
170 x 100cm each (last - 210 x 430cm)
This Is Not an Abstract World is a series of charcoal drawings on cotton canvas that begins with acts of observation. Floors, walls, stains, graffiti, humidity and vegetation become the starting point for a process of repetition, accumulation and erasure through which the drawings depart from their point of origin, gradually inventing their own internal logic.
Growing up in Nicosia, a city divided by the Green Line, I became aware of how forms of division become inscribed into architecture and everyday surfaces. Rather than depicting the border itself, these drawings explore how architecture and everyday surfaces absorb, carry and transform histories of division.
The vertical line becomes the primary element through which the drawings unfold. Repeated, interrupted and transformed, it bends, breaks, thickens, dissolves and reappears, oscillating between order and instability. It can evoke a wall, rain, vegetation, a fence, erosion or handwriting, never settling into a single image. Through accumulation, the drawings move continuously between representation and abstraction, allowing landscapes, architectural fragments and bodily gestures to emerge and disappear.
Charcoal is treated as an unstable material rather than a fixed drawing medium. It is layered, rubbed into the canvas, partially erased and, in some works, altered with water, which interrupts carefully constructed surfaces through gravity and chance. Rather than correcting the drawing, these interventions become part of its structure, introducing processes of erosion, collapse and renewal.
The surface becomes a place where personal memory, political histories and material transformation meet. Instead of presenting borders as fixed lines, the drawings imagine them as living structures - continuously shaped by time, pressure and movement. Abstraction here does not describe the absence of the world, but another way of encountering it.
behind shining bars i found myself and flied - Exgirlfriend gallery, Berlin, 2023
galvanised steel tubes and connectors, aluminum mirror sheet, plexiglass, stainless steel chain, lock, plastic zip ties, laser photo print, acrylic spray paint
350 x 170 x 400 cm
exhibition views
WERY WOR!
curated by Elena Feijoo
Exgirlfriend Gallery Berlin
21 May - 11 June 2023
behind shining bars I found myself and flied brings together architecture, photography and language within a temporary rooftop installation. Borrowing materials from the visual landscape of the contemporary city - galvanised steel tubes, mirrored aluminium, transparent plexiglass, photographic prints, spray paint, a chain and a lock - it assembles a structure that resembles something functional while resisting any clear purpose.
At its centre is a photograph of a suburban house encountered outside Berlin, printed across two transparent plexiglass panels. Its carefully maintained façade, enclosed boundaries and technological efficiency project an ideal of domestic order, while suggesting how the desire for protection can gradually become a condition of enclosure. Printed on transparent plexiglass, the image acquires a physical transparency that contrasts with the defensive architecture it depicts.
The phrase 'behind shining bars I found myself and flied', spray-painted across the mirrored aluminium, introduces language as another material of the installation. Its deliberate grammatical disruption resists linguistic correctness, opening language to invention rather than obedience. The mirrored surface simultaneously incorporates the viewer, the surrounding city and the changing sky into the work, producing an image that is never fixed but continuously rewritten through movement and reflection.
Make a Wish - Exgirlfriend gallery, Berlin, 2023
plastic bathtub, metallic drying rack, stainless steel shower head, inkjet print on cotton canvas, water pump, water, mettallic grey pvc strip curtain
70 x 70 x 130cm
exhibition views
WERY WOR!
curated by Elena Feijoo
Exgirlfriend Gallery Berlin
May - June 2023
It's ok to cry - Villa Arson, Nice (France), 2022
photos from graduation exhibition
Villa Arson - Nice, France
Just Sex and Other Ordinary Stuff - triptych, 2022
from left to right:
The Never Ending Story of a Jerk
charcoal, pencils, colours, offset photo print, acrylic primer, cotton canvas
170 x 170cm
BOOM!
oil paint, glitters, charcol, offset photo print, acrylic primer, cotton canvas
170 x 170cm
Swallow It All and Just Play
acrylics, spray paint, pastels, colour pencils, offset photo print, acrylic primer, cotton canvas
170 x 170cm