Larnaca Biennale is excited to announce Sana López Abellán as curator of the fourth edition of the Larnaca Biennale, to be held in 2025. Larnaca Biennale is a city-wide project for artistic experimentation in contemporary art, comprising an international open call, exhibitions, theatre, performances, concerts, activities, lectures and workshops – attracting an audience of over 60000 visitors. The Biennale will run from Wednesday October 15 to Friday November 28, 2025. The theme and open call details of the fourth Larnaca Biennale will be announced in a further statement in March 2024.
Statement from Larnaca Biennale organizing committee
“We are overwhelmed to have Sana with us on this new journey for the fourth edition of Larnaca Biennale. As a team we have collaborated with her from different posts in two of our previous editions and we are happy that this time we will have the chance to expand our collaboration for a project that we are certain it will surpass the previous ones. Sana’s experience as an artist, curator and gallery manager assures for a most successful Larnaca Biennale 2025.
Statement from Sana López Abellán
“Imagine the thrill of being able to investigate a tiny fraction of human expression in the context of a biennale that is located in a geographically pivotal point on the map… I am looking forward to curating an inclusive project and profound selection of works across all disciplines, that can contribute to our appreciation of the forms artistic expression can take and of the limitless imagination present in all of us. Having followed the Larnaca Biennale closely since its establishment, I am more than excited to collaborate in this edition, and hope to inspire both artists and visitors throughout the process that is about to kick off!’’
THE THEME
Along lines and traces
In this fourth Larnaca Biennale, ́lines and traces ́ will form the support upon which we can imagine metaphoric, symbolic and physical expressions of how we make sense of our world and our placement in it. From how lineages and traditions develop, how stories narrate, how thoughts are constructed, to how we move, how we connect and communicate, and how we create and produce meaning.
As humans, we are primarily sustained by our actions and our movements in life. What if we would imagine our world along lines and traces? As a start, we can think of how our repetitive movements over a territory would leave a trace on the natural landscape and how scraping over a surface could make our existence seen thousands of years later. Not only do the traces speak to us about our past, they also inform our future.
These lines become even more fascinating when they start reflecting connections between people: when the lines become an abstraction through which we communicate, but also a testament to our movement in history, a convergence or node.
Lines have proven to be able to become barriers, borders, demarcations, but can also become surfaces on which to thrive, as the warp and weft of a textile, or the build up of text and musical score. The word line etymologically stems from ́linen ́, the spun thread of flax fibres, tightly twisted together. The concept of a line is most inspiring when it is conceived precisely as this: a connection, deeply intertwined relationships and a vehicle for exchange.
When talking about lines, here, it is important to challenge fixed views of the line as a (preferably straight) connection between points, or any hierarchical connotations of growth, development or stagnation, so persistent in contemporary Western thinking. The lines and traces addressed here are imagined as much more human, and therefore complex and contradictory in all their splendour. Most importantly, the line we imagine here is not finite, it is (re) produced as life itself is. In many cultures cosmological concepts are given form through line patterns, on bodies, objects and even in the landscape. It is this dynamic concept of lines and traces, conceiving them as carriers of meaning, that is central to this edition of the Biennale.
How can a simple line come to embody so much significance? By exploring terrains as vast as movement, language, writing, text, textiles, drawing, map making and topography, little by little a glimpse will unfold about how traces, lines, threads and their variations form a fundamental part of our existence.
In this concept Along Lines and Traces, our focus will lie on how thinking about lines can contribute to our understanding of our expressions of humanity in the world. How can the tactile, shapes, materials, and sensorial experiences reflect our inner world into the exterior? Can that which is unspoken reach us directly through an abstraction? By inviting artists to present their work within this concept, a myriad of interpretations and materializations will emerge that will undoubtedly raise more questions than answers. It is up to the viewer to unravel what is presented in front of them and connect the dots, tie the knots, follow the line, weave the thread, tread the path, and make the connection.
March 2024, Sana López Abellán
