From March 14, The Breeder Studyroom hosts Socratis Socratous with an installation-retrospective of the most important milestones of his long career, consisting of historical works, photographic material, objects, publications and documents from his personal archive. The environment that Socratous creates here is a personal narrative in the form of a visual lecture with unpublished material that completes the works themselves. Sokratous' practice consists of a variety of media including photography, installations, performance and sculpture while incorporating methods of sociological research, fieldwork and archival classification. Themes such as collective trauma, loss, displacement and destruction are negotiated in his work. From the violent partition of his native Cyprus and the internal migration that followed to the crisis in the Middle East and the political upheavals in the capitals of the Western world, Socratous' work is deeply political, open to different interpretations while keeping the aesthetic dimension intact.

In the installation that he will present at The Breeder Studyroom, Socratous is at his most extroverted and for the first time shares personal archival material that captures unseen moments of the journey, research, practice and preparation behind the production of major projects, such as the installation Rumours, with which he represented Cyprus at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, negotiating the concept of the foreign, and the project Blue Beret Camp (2011), a series of photographs taken in the occupied part of Cyprus documenting the daily life of UN soldiers. It also includes material from his project A Cave in Dhariya (2012), presented as part of the Riwaq Biennale and resulting from his two-month stay in Palestine, material from the charged socio-political climate in Athens after the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007, as well as references to the project Stolen Garden (2014) where he combines his affinity for the subject and craftsmanship with his interest in exploring the idea of the garden as a space between the private and the public. Retrospective material from the Newspaper show (2012), Auction Lots (2017) and the Salvage/FOVOS Handbook (2019-2013) will also be present.

Read more on The Breeder Studyroom here