If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes. If we opened me up, we'd find beaches... Memory is like sand in my hand... - Agnés Varda

Ioannides's work explores memory as a shifting terrain: fragile, fluid, and endlessly reshaped. At its centre is the square, borrowed from archaeological excavation: a structure that attempts to impose order yet continually tilts, breaks, and reforms. Metal frameworks evoke construction and containment and echo systems of discipline, while the reflective surface of the mirror traverses our ways of seeing the work and ourselves within it, pushing back with sensuality and defiance. Charcoal frottages taken from the tiled floor of the artist's childhood home carry intimate traces of domestic life. Water flows across these structures, refusing containment and evoking a womb-like sense of suspension and trust. Birds, light and unpredictable, introduce a subtle, yet wild counter current. At the same time, the use of charcoal gathered from Cyprus's burned villages in the big fire of the summer of 2025, becomes both medium and memory, filling this “castle of sand” with fragments that invite us to drift, imagine, and rediscover grief and renewal. 

text by Dr. Elena Stylianou

Rien Faire Comme une Bête - AOA;87 gallery, Berlin (Germany), 2025

charcoal on cotton canvas, steel tubes, galvanised steel tube connectors, aluminium stretchers

variable dimensions (270 x 450cm)

exhibition views

Abyss of Absence 

curated by Jonah Kittelmann

AOA;87 gallery Berlin

07.08?2025 - 06.09.2025

Watermelon Tree - Zilberman Gallery Berlin, 2024

charcoal on cotton canvas

160 x 200cm

exhibition views

You say I have unlimited potential. I disagree.

curated by Lusin Reinsch

Zilbeman Gallery Berlin

19.07 - 24.08.2024

Playing with the absurdity of its title, Watermelon Tree explores a continuous tension between desire and withdrawal - between reaching for potential and resisting it. It proposes an impossibility, yet in doing so opens a space for imagination, for new ways of seeing, and for growth to emerge.

Working with charcoal on canvas - materials rooted in the history of fine art - the piece both engages with and challenges tradition. Drawing, historically positioned as preparatory to painting, takes center stage here, shifting from a subordinate role toward a more autonomous and expansive potential.

Watermelon Tree exists on the threshold between figuration and abstraction. Depth and complexity emerge through the accumulation and layering of interwoven forms. Echoes of nature, sound, language, and symbolic marks surface across the canvas, forming a dense composition shaped by tension: movement and stillness, lightness and weight, order and chaos.

Ceuising Utopia - Studio Teile, Berlin, 2025

charcoal on cotton canvas

180 x 170cm

exhibition views

On Transformation

curated by Alix Weidner

Studio Teile Berlin

May 2025

Ioannides' painting “Cruising Utopia” - referring to José Esteban Muñoz’ book on queer theory, focuses on the fluidity and movement of forms. Using fairly limited means and a limited palette of colours (charcoal on uncoated canvas), he creates dynamic forms conveying an effect of constant movement. The dark shapes perhaps recall the water currents that surround the land where he grew up: the island of Cyprus?  Sometimes, these forms are derived from signs and writing. Sometimes, too, they become almost troubling, oppressive masses, resembling walls. Others will see them as clouds or swarms: present but still difficult to grasp, ephemeral and in perpetual becoming.

text by Alix Weidner

Under the Blooming Sky, 2024 - ongoing

charcoal on cotton canvas

ongoing series (since 2024)

170 x 180cm each (last - 220 x 170cm)

The Wall - Villa Arson, Nice (France), 2023

steel tubes, galvanised steel tube connectors, carcoal, acrylic spray paint, stainless steel mirror, plastic zip ties, cotton fabric

400 x 380 x 30cm

2023

exhibition views

Ce qui nous oblige

curated by Sophie Lapalu

Villa Arson, Nice (France)

29.09.2023 - 28.01.2024

exhibition views from Ce qui nous oblige - Villa Arson, Nice (France), 2023

curated by Sophie Lapalu

29.09.2023 - 28.01.2024

from left to right: 

Fly Fly my Little Shaking Heart

charcoal on cotton canvas

190 x 200cm

2023

Under a Thundering Bed I Hide

charcoal on cotton canvas (two panels)

320 x 200cm

2023

In Between Freedom and Must

charcoal on cotton canvas (two panels) 

295 x 200cm

2023

Nicosia, Cyprus, is divided by the Green Line - a border where political and social tensions are inscribed into space, architecture, and everyday life. Within this context, this series examines what happens when lines of control are tested, broken, or released, translating both the physical and symbolic conditions of division into material and gestural form.

At the core of the works is the vertical line: repeated, bent, swung, fractured. It rarely stands still, continually negotiating between containment and release. The line operates simultaneously as border, trace, and gesture - a formal element, a marker of human presence, and a sign of political and bodily constraint. Its disruption and dissolution make visible the tension between structure and freedom, authority and agency.

The drawings are informed by close observation of architecture, urban surfaces, and natural processes. Floors and walls are traced, textured, and layered; graffiti, tags, and ephemeral inscriptions register human intervention within rigid systems. Mold, plants, and humidity deform surfaces, suggesting nature’s gradual reclamation of space. Charcoal is pushed beyond its conventional use - layered, erased, and in some works altered with water, which partially removes and transforms the drawn surface, interrupting labor-intensive marks and producing zones of appearance, disappearance, and unexpected transformation.

These works unfold as landscapes of collapse, persistence, and becoming. Lines fall and resist, surfaces accumulate and erode, tension is both held and released. The series proposes that boundaries - political, architectural, or bodily - are never fixed, but remain sites of negotiation, resistance, and trace. Here, gesture, material, and concept converge in an ongoing inquiry into how borders are inhabited, challenged, and transformed.

behind shining bars i found myself and flied - Exgirlfriend gallery, Berlin, 2023

galvanised steel tubes and connectors, aluminum mirror sheet, plexiglass, stainless steel chain, lock, plastic zip ties, laser photo print, acrylic spray paint

350 x 170 x 400 cm

exhibition views

WERY WOR!

curated by Elena Feijoo

Exgirlfriend Gallery Berlin

21 May - 11 June 2023

Make a Wish - Exgirlfriend gallery, Berlin, 2023

plastic bathtub, metallic drying rack, stainless steel shower head, inkjet print on cotton canvas, water pump, water, mettallic grey pvc strip curtain

70 x 70 x 130cm

exhibition views

WERY WOR!

curated by Elena Feijoo

Exgirlfriend Gallery Berlin

May - June 2023

The creation of an aquatic world - submerged in a blue environment, water and liquidity are omnipresent in the space and the sound of water drops envelops the whole ensemble. While the blue light creates a radical separation with the outside world, giving the impression of entering an imaginary space - a parallel dreamlike reality, the presentation invites to a sensorial experience and to self-interrogation.

The space was created to be experienced rather than just seen. The water on the floor, dripped from the fountain and the reversed bucket, as well as the sand castles, create the illusion of a landscape. Like being on a beach site, assisting on the environment's ever lasting movement and changing. Visitors can follow their own paths around the works, allowing for the creation of dialogues and stories between them. Dialogues that are even further expanded by the use of mirrored surfaces, creating a game of reflections and light projections. In certain moments, the spectators can perceive their own reflection, therefore becoming momentarily part of the work and allowing for introspection on a directly personal level.

In my work, I use familiar objects and material to stimulate the memorial conscience and generate new reactions towards them. Starting from personal and autobiographical elements, I break the narrative and incorporate openess to it by using abstraction and familiarity (familiar imageries). Thus, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and takes new reinvented perspectives and meanings. This installation is an open invitation for visitors to enter into my world, hoping they can find themselves through it and be touched on a deeper personal level. 

_____

The installation constructs an aquatic environment in which blue light, water, and sound form a continuous atmospheric field. Dripping water resonates throughout the space, while the saturated blue light produces a clear separation from the surrounding environment, establishing the sense of a self-contained, parallel space.

The work operates as a spatial situation to be navigated rather than a scene to be viewed. Water accumulates and circulates across the floor through a fountain and an inverted bucket, while sand formations suggest a shifting, unstable landscape. The installation unfolds as a terrain in constant reconfiguration, shaped by material processes and slow environmental change.

Mirrored surfaces extend the spatial logic of the work through reflection and displacement. As viewers move through the installation, their presence is intermittently folded into the environment, producing shifting relations between body, image, and space.

Familiar materials and objects are recontextualized within this constructed environment, where recognition and abstraction coexist. The installation positions the everyday within altered perceptual conditions, where material, light, and reflection continuously reorganize spatial perception.

Just Sex and Other Ordinary Stuff - triptych, 2022

from left to right: 

The Never Ending Story of a Jerk

charcoal, pencils, colours, offset photo print, acrylic primer, cotton canvas

170 x 170cm 

BOOM!

oil paint, glitters, charcol, offset photo print, acrylic primer, cotton canvas

170 x 170cm

Swallow It All and Just Play

acrylics, spray paint, pastels, colour pencils, offset photo print, acrylic primer, cotton canvas

170 x 170cm