Dialogues and Exchanges on Contemporary Art, Society and Place within Higher Art Education: Nicosia – Rio de Janeiro

The Fine Art Programme of the Department of Design and Multimedia at the University of Nicosia, in collaboration with Kartzin by Visual Voices, is pleased to announce Dialogues and Exchanges on Contemporary Art, Society and Place within Higher Art Education: Nicosia – Rio de Janeiro.

Taking place at Kartzin x Visual Voices in Nicosia, the event marks two significant milestones: 10 years since the first graduates of the BA in Fine Art programme at the University of Nicosia and 10 years of collaboration with the Department of Contemporary Art at Federal Fluminense University, Brazil.

Over the past decade, this collaboration has supported a rich programme of exchanges through exhibitions, academic conferences, educational initiatives, and publishing projects. In 2026, the University of Nicosia welcomes Dr Luiz Guilherme Vergara, Associate Professor at Federal Fluminense University, for his third visit to Nicosia. His visit is funded by the University of Nicosia Erasmus+ programme and supported by the Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies.

The exchange opens a space for critical reflection on the realities, responsibilities, and values of art education today, particularly at a time when creative practice, research, and pedagogy are increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and rapidly changing social conditions.

The event will take place alongside Nurturing What Might Still Be, the final degree show of graduating students from the Fine Art Programme at the University of Nicosia.

Visual Voices Kartzin Colloquium 2026

The event forms part of the inaugural programme of the Visual Voices Kartzin Colloquium 2026, a curated series of lectures, artist talks, workshops, and reading groups dedicated to socially engaged art and its role in advancing freedom of expression in Cyprus.

The Colloquium is part of the wider programming of the Kartzin Socially Engaged Arts Lab, a Visual Voices initiative funded by the Commonwealth Foundation. Curated by Melina Philippou, architect and urbanist, and Selin Genç, art historian and anthropologist, the Colloquium is grounded in critical debates around participation, authorship, ethics of encounter, and public space. It aims to support artistic freedom, strengthen a growing community of socially engaged art practitioners in Cyprus, and invite wider publics into the questions, methods, and possibilities of the field.

Lectures

Art, Agency and Placefulness: A Brazilian Approach to Utopian Pragmatism

Dr Luiz Guilherme Vergara
Associate Professor, Federal Fluminense University, Brazil

Dr Vergara’s lecture will foreground site-specific curatorial practices shaped by Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói and its dialogue with the Guanabara Bay eco-social landscape in Rio de Janeiro.

From Audience Participation to Workshop and Assembly Aesthetics in Cypriot Art of the Twenty-First Century

Dr Evanthia (Evi) Tselika
Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Fine Art Programme, University of Nicosia

Dr Tselika’s lecture will reflect on key aspects of Cypriot socially engaged art practices over the past 20 years, with a focus on learning, commoning, ethics, and political imagination.

The two lectures will be followed by responses from Dr Gavriel Koureas, art historian and Co-Director of the Celadon Center for Arts & Ecologies, and Constantinos Taliotis, artist and Assistant Professor at the University of Nicosia.

Event Details

Date: Wednesday, 10 June 2026
Time: 18:30 – 20:00 EEST
Venue: Kartzin x Visual Voices, Aishylou 83, 1011 Nicosia
Admission: Open to the public

Accompanying Exhibition

Nurturing What Might Still Be

The Fine Art Programme of the Department of Design and Multimedia at the University of Nicosia, in collaboration with Kartzin by Visual Voices, presents Nurturing What Might Still Be, the final degree show of graduating students:

Chara Charalambidou, Andrea Efstathiou, Anmari Gregoriou, Sia Kourtseva, Mariia Nikolskaia, Georgia Perikleous, and Niki Rabiie.

The exhibition takes its title from Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble (2016), drawing on her reflections on collective responsibility, coexistence, and collaborative world-making. Engaging with elements such as fire, air, earth, and water, the graduating artists approach landscape as an active field of encounter, shaped by ecological, personal, historical, and material conditions.

Through drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, embodied movement, and sustainable material practices, the works explore memory, environmental fragility, transformation, and the fragile continuity of human and more-than-human presence in the landscape.

Exhibition Details

Opening: Friday, 5 June 2026, 19:00 – 22:00
Duration: 5 – 10 June 2026
Venue: Kartzin x Visual Voices, Aishylou 83, 1011 Nicosia

Opening Hours:
Saturday: 11:00 – 14:00
Monday and Wednesday: 17:00 – 20:00
Tuesday: 13:00 – 17:00
Sunday: Closed

Photo credit: Mariia Nikolskaia
Graphic design: Ozan Tezvaran Studio