Artists notes on 2007 works:

… at the front line

So what are these two ladies doing at the front line (otherwise known the Green Line)?  What does the “designer” tent symbolize?  Are they protesting?!  Are they nouveau-refugee?!  Are they camping?  They unsettle familiar associations mocking and provoking a serious situation.  Are they serious, cynical or just vacuous indifference of their home country, Cyprus?  Why are they putting themselves through this… “banality” and why the Ladies staging themselves playing backgammon (tavli, considered in these areas as a traditional male game), all dressed up in seventies clothes?  Are they making references to 1974 war?  Are they procrastinating now?  Are they: authentic”?  Is this documentary photography?  Is this a generation gap, those who lived through the war and the post-war generation of “live and let live”?  Are they making a spectacle of themselves?  What exactly is the Washing-Up Ladies message here?  … or do they aim to explore the ongoing territorial anxiety, desires, violence – not as an end to itself, but as a means to understand their world which seems devoid of the recognitions of its own complexity (albeit mocking a never-ending saga of “the Cyprus problem” using black humor).

-“Procrastinating…it’s like being in a pantomime, unsure whether you are meant to be the part of the donkey or play the leading role, but then again these are desperate (or exasperating) times…”

-“People are always expecting us to conform to designated roles… then we start backtracking immediately: one wants to accomplish big things but in the end it doesn’t happen, in the end we are just perceived as just attention seeking females…. A confrontation on the notion that “women should not meddle with serious political issues”?!

Their latest 17-foot poster, is a complex mixture of politics, history, media imagery, culture, artistic references, fashion and forewarning via a semi-staged photograph takes place at the Green line (end of Ledra street in Nicosia), commenting on an ongoing dialogue with the current conflicts and socio-political processes taking place in Cyprus.  Avoiding photomontage and image manipulation (except for the on-looking soldier guard), with Humour Irony and Laughter they take on the general idea of context and conflict, of the legal and the illegal, of truth and falsity and of kitsch via an intervention into loaded spaces of the city.  With anecdotal character, the set-up (real and unreal) offers concers that even oppose the ironic stance and the hollowness of common realities.

Avoiding photomontage, the typed pop text contextualizing as much as narrative the image…  and one wonders whether this photo is just a fragment of a larger narrative, perhaps playing out a scene for a film or from a comic photo-story book (references to pop art cartoons).

The Washing-Up Ladies, like the Guerrilla Girls (they also met in person for a joint interview/presentation for Arteri art magazine just before their Istanbul biennale participation) they too, take on humour to promote current local feminist issues that are often taken as secondary “less important” matters to attend.  Are these women representatives of “contemporary urban Cypriot women” or a fragmented notion of “globalised women” today look, producing images from their own reality?  Like their previous projects, the Washing Up Ladies “strike again”, on the lookout for whatever pushes their limits of their past and present.