Stelios Kallinikou
Radar Station, 2018

I remember myself standing in front of a powerful image at the solo exhibition that Kallinikou presented this year at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, concluding his residency there. Among other strong works based on experimenting with surveillance, landscape, and the politics of image, this photographic image entitled Radar Station (2018) portrays a starry sky mesmerizing us with the feeling of breathing into the infinity of the universe. The moment captured here poetically reflects the perfection of the composition of the cosmos. While this romantic atmosphere creates such an illusion, the twin white spheres bring up a critical question about how our sky has been globally controlled, monitored, and scanned. Kallinikou took this photo at the highest point of the island which also hosts the oldest British military base on [Cyprus]—there since 1878. It is called Troodos.

Except from “Locations of Gaze” by Misal Adnan Yıldız, published on the occasion of the exhibition “hypersurfacing” curated by Marina Christodoulidou at NiMAC, Nicosia, Cyprus, 2019.