- Ariana Kalliga
Artists: Joyce Joumaa, Iris Touliatou, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian
Mutable Cycles is a group exhibition exploring the dismantling of public infrastructures in service of private profit. The featured artists turn to recent histories of financial fallout and its aftermaths—from collective struggles over home foreclosures in Cyprus since 2012–13, to the 2019 solar energy boom in Lebanon—in order to think through debt, property, and the right to public goods. Mutable Cycles features work by Joyce Joumaa, Iris Touliatou, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian.
Joyce Joumaa’s video installation Mutable Cycles II (2024) pairs present-day imagery of solar panels in Lebanon with footage from the nationwide protests of 2019, drawing attention to the adoption of this renewable energy source as a stand-in for the state’s failure to provide electricity following the country’s economic collapse. As the earth revolves around the sun, Mutable Cycles II charts the cyclical temporality of infrastructural crisis, whereby state corruption both enables and forecloses the possibility of citizen-led solutions.
Untitled (Diversion) (2025), Iris Touliatou’s site-specific installation, consists of a wall-mounted phone and an annotated agreement, outlining the conditions of the phone’s presence and use within the gallery. The artist forwards her calls and utility bills to the museum during the exhibition period, bringing the daily economies of Touliatou’s life in Athens into conversation with the administrative operations of the museum.
Investigating the effects of financialization and austerity, the collaborative project The Broken Pitcher (2022–) by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian takes the form of a study room and film. The project considers the rise of home foreclosures in Cyprus after the country’s 2012–13 financial crisis. The exhibited research materials situate the foreclosures within a longer colonial history of property, land theft, and debt under the British Mandate. Featuring interviews with international housing rights activists, lawyers, economists, and artists, the accompanying film expands the project’s investigation into methods of collective intervention and resistance.
Employing film, photography, research materials, and installation, Mutable Cycles foregrounds the varied strategies of artists interfacing with the larger political and economic transformations around them, reflecting on these events’ fraught histories and their ongoing reverberations in the present.
