Maria and Neoptolemos Michaelides Residence

Point Centre for Contemporary Art presents an exhibition featuring photos of Maria and Neoptolemos Michaelides’ residence by the renowned architectural photographer Hélène Binet. Point commissioned Binet to come to Cyprus and photograph the house which was designed by Neoptolemos Michaelides and was constructed in the mid-sixties.

The exhibition places the focus upon the outstanding work of Neoptolemos Michaelides, one of the key figures of architectural modernism in Cyprus, and simultaneously opens the discourse around it at an international level. Through the lens of Binet the interior and exterior of the house that the architect and his artist wife resided, is being reduced to the qualities and core values that characterised Michaelides’ working idiosyncrasy; nothing excessive, clear forms, simple but not simplistic, local traditional structural elements and materials in dialogue with modern elements and tendencies. Before setting up her heavy analogue cameras and beginning to structure her images, Binet spent time in and around the house, engaging in an intimate experience of the building following a ritual-like procedure. Her frames emphasise the strong concept behind the residential building and highlight the qualities represented on its structural elements.  Binet (re)introduces us to the world of the architect with images that trigger thinking processes and dreams and invites us to reflect on the essence of things, a process that defined Michaelides’ working and living philosophy.

Binet, who is internationally acknowledged as one of the world’s leading architectural photographers, established her own personal style in this field during the past twenty-five years. She has developed a unique way of looking at buildings, penetrating to their core, capturing the values and truths that they encapsulate and exposing them in her photographs. The underlying theme in her work is the interplay of light, shadow and texture of materials and architectural elements. She has an extraordinary ability to orchestrate these three elements and reveal the buildings’ power. By choosing to focus on certain details, elements or lines and to position them together in her frames, she initiates a dialogue between them. Thus, her work goes beyond documentation and is best described as a compositional process that brings forward essential connections and associations. Her images present us with an experience of the building instead of a view and at the same time they reveal the architect’s vision, which is often juxtaposed or distorted by the lived reality.