A Compass without North

A Compass without North

A Compass without North marks a significant shift in Klitsa Antoniou’s practice, moving away from her earlier engagement with memory and historical reconstruction toward a more introspective exploration of direction, suspension, and uncertainty. In this exhibition, space is not structured by narrative or event, but by conditions. These are states in which function is interrupted and reconfigured as a field of awareness.
The compass that gives the exhibition its title is not presented as a failed instrument, but as one liberated from its directive role. Detached from its obligation to orient, it becomes a metaphor for potentiality. It is a system no longer bound to fixed outcomes, but open to deviation, pause, and transformation. This idea of active inoperativity runs throughout the exhibition, where objects and forms resist their conventional purposes and instead invite contemplation.
Antoniou’s works, ranging from marble to video and from casts to traces, form a constellation of suspended moments. Rather than representing the world, they create a distance from it, allowing alternative perceptual rhythms to emerge. Disorientation here is not framed as loss, but as a critical method. It becomes a way of revealing the instability of established reference points and the fragility of systems we often take for granted.
Across the exhibition, orientation becomes relational rather than fixed. Meaning arises through shifts, returns, and deviations, suggesting that stability is less essential than movement and change. In this intermediate space, between active and inactive, internal and external, certain and indeterminate, Antoniou proposes a quiet yet powerful reconsideration of how we locate ourselves in the world.
A Compass without North invites viewers to inhabit a state of suspension, where uncertainty is not resolved but embraced as a condition of presence and possibility.