Marina Xenofontos. Play Life

Through her sculptures, found objects, writing and films, Marina Xenofontos interrogates the material manifestations of memory and history. For her show in the Espace Projet, she explores the question of space, both virtual and real.

Through precise gestures, Marina Xenofontos lends new weight to objects that she moves, replicates, or transforms, simultaneously reconfiguring the space they inhabit. The exhibition Play Life is articulated around the question of the double, which the artist explores at the intersection of real and virtual space. Her project revolves around the video game Twice Upon a While (2018-2025), which is shown here in its definitive form for the first time and in which visitors are active participants. The question of the identical or the almost same, of true and false, of the authentic and the replica is diffracted and refracted in the exhibition space, not in a play of dichotomies but rather in a slipping between levels of reality, between given contexts and uses.

A sculptor who works in multiple modes, Marina Xenofontos addresses the material manifestations of ideology and knowledge, based on both her personal archives and the historical context of Cyprus, where she was born. She conceives her sculptures and readymades as tangible traces through which social and political transitions can be read. As she puts it, “I set about with an interest in materials, symbols, and elements that are not necessarily connected on a formal level, but are rather entangled by ties in history and politics. These may be found objects that I reform or modify to glean new meaning, or further concentrate the associations inherent in them.”

Exhibition curator: Nicole Schweizer, contemporary art curator, MCBA