Maria ­Toumazou
Half frame
16. February – 27. April 2025
Overbeck-Gesellschaft and St. Petri

In HALF FRAME, Marai Toumazou utilises the mechanisms of photographic imagemaking as a methodology to (re)develop new and earlier work. The title of the exhibition refers to the half-frame camera design that came to prominence in the early 1960s, transforming photography by halving the size of each frame on a standard 35mm film roll, effectively doubling the number of exposures for the same cost. On one hand, this doubling set in motion the intensification of photographic representation, enabling more and more people to document their lives through the lens of a camera.
On the other, it can also be understood as a harbinger of the drive towards continuous technical progress, and the cascade of fragmented, decentralized and hyper-referential images that characterize our mediatised present.

Across the exhibition, Toumazou references three-dimensional modes of image construction and capture, forming an optical experience that is ephemeral, partial, fleeting. For the artist, these allegories of vision might also function as reparative forms of knowledge. By exposing our thwarted desire for the complete picture, Toumazou interrogates how this sensorial disruption can alter perception, and move us beyond a state of perpetual repetition.

HALF FRAME extends to a second location, the Kulturkirche St. Petri, where sculptures appropriate and reinterpret pre-existing objects, including the canon of a bell from a church in Nicosia, Cyprus, its tentacular form enlarged to human scale; Emily, Midea and Serpa brand fans that, denuded of their blades, mimic surveillance apparatuses; and the remnants of a set of deadstock dinner plates bearing the image of an aspirational cityscape, sourced from a shop in Nicosia’s old town. Just as myths cycle through cultures, branded goods also circulate through the global economy—a profound antagonism often glimpsed in the context of Cyprus.

In her works, Toumazou explores the latent potentialities of found objects and pre-existing artistic positions, tracing histories of (re)use as well as their narrative contingencies. Through the relational choreography of site, object and image, the artist expands fixed understandings of identity, authenticity and collaboration. In Lübeck, Toumazou restages sculpture, objects and emblems, crafting a recursive cycle of gesture and sensation that hints at the future that never was. Taken together, HALF FRAME tests a series of scenes in which memory, affect and perception function simultaneously. In turn, Toumazou proposes a viewpoint from which to survey the detritus of technological and cultural optimism; a parade of half frames.

curated by Paula Kommoss

­Opening program

Sunday, February 16, 1 pm
Sound performance, St. Petri zu Lübeck
with Nina Nadig

Sunday, February 16, 3 pm
Conversational guided tour through the exhibition,
Overbeck-Gesellschaft
with Maria Toumazou and Paula Kommoss
in English

Sunday, March 8, 1pm
Curatorial guided tour through the exhibition,
St. Petri zu Lübeck
with Paula Kommoss

Sunday, April 27, 3pm
Finissage with curatorial guided tour,
Overbeck-Gesellschaft
with Paula Kommoss

BOOKLET
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