A Partial History by marinakassianidou

A Library for the Future

Mary Annunziata

Since I was a young child, I have romanticized old things: an antique metal button with Cleopatra’s profile; crumpled bills from countries that now bear different names; a brittle whalebone that washed up on the shore of my grandparents’ beach house. I hunted for smooth shards of blue and white china at the river’s edge, assembling the fragments into imagined mosaics, and taught myself how to write in hieroglyphics, encoding secret messages into my diaries. I often had my nose buried in Nancy Drew novels whose titles hinted at the mysteries I fantasized lay hidden in the world around me: The Secret of the Old Clock; The Clue of the Broken Locket; The Strange Message in the Parchment. Objects connected to my family history hold a special sort of fascination, promising to reveal something about ancestors I had only heard of, or open windows into the lives of my parents or grandparents before I knew them. Among my most prized possessions is a rusted bolt from the factory floor in the Alaskan mining town where my great-grandparents met. I traveled deep into the state’s forbidding interior to reach the site, on a road paved over railroad tracks that once hauled copper from the world’s richest mine. Buildings folded in on one another, a glacier receded unmistakably from signs of civilization, and a one-room museum displayed a staff roster under glass, my great-grandfather’s name at the top of the page.

When I first learned of Marina Kassianidou’s work in 2020, I recognized in the artist something of the antiquarian, the family archivist, the detective. For years, Marina has laboriously recreated 19th and 20th

century Cypriot schoolbooks from her late grandmother’s collection for her ongoing series, A Partial History. Originally belonging to the artist’s grandparents and great uncle, the more than forty books are written in an old form of Greek and span topics including history, geography, religion, and economics.

To date, Marina has recreated eight of the original texts. First “re-reading” each book as a material object, she focuses on the thousands of marks made by usage and time: folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations, and wormholes. She then traces around each mark by hand, one page at a time, and scans, prints, and binds her drawings into a series of artist’s books, alternative histories formed from abstract lines that allude to past lives.

A Partial History is an elegy, an excavation, a reconstitution and a remembering. Yet Marina’s work is not so firmly anchored in the past. Closer readings reveal traces of the futurist in the artist’s endeavor. The work invites a shift in how we experience the past in relation to the future, a concept that British anthropologist Tim Ingold has examined, something that is “not about the transmission of knowledge, from one generation to the next, but about the growth of wisdom in intergenerational collaboration.”1

Through the artist’s preoccupation with collaborative mark-making, experiential forms of reading and challenging history, and finally, the exploration of time as an intergenerational continuum, A Partial History celebrates a call and response through the material history of ancestors. In tracing the lines of her forebears and focusing on the persistence of the ephemeral, Marina offers a refrain, charts a new map, and builds a library for the future.

For Marina, marking a surface is both a fundamental way of communicating meaning and declaring existence

in the world. She obsesses over marks, how they fall on surfaces, what meanings they might suggest. In her site-specific installation practice, she works primarily with surfaces found in her immediate surroundings, such as walls, floors, fabrics, paper, and even digital screens. Marina studies each surface closely and experiments with ways of marking that respond to the surface’s appearance, use, or history. As a result, her marks become nearly indiscernible, receding into the surface or becoming confused with accidental, natural, or mechanically made marks.

The work is slow, methodical. “While making [A Partial History],” Marina writes, “I have found myself sitting for hours, bent over the pages of each book, my body just a few inches from it. My movements are controlled and restrained, small and relatively still, almost as if emulating the stillness of the page. The extended time spent with each book while drawing leads to an increased familiarity over time, an increased sensitization to its surfaces. The more I observe and draw, the more variations and pre-existing marks I can detect.” Her practice of tracing, which both affirms and effaces the artist’s hand, is inherently relational, exploring the dynamic between hand and surface; self and other; between past, present, and future. In studying the subtle traces of her elders’ existence, Marina bears witness to the past and acknowledges her family members’ roles in it, their thumbed pages, looping script, the incidents and accidents of their holding and handling. By tracing their marks and making them visible through her touch, Marina asserts her own presence, her response to her forebears, her contemporary “re”marks.

This responsive collaboration in A Partial History evokes the enigmatic French educator Fernand Deligny’s large cartographic tracings depicting lignes d’erre, or “wander lines,” famously explored in Deleuze and

Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. In the 1960s, Deligny and his collaborators began a longstanding project to trace the movements and trajectories of the autistic students they lived and worked with as they roamed across the rocky territory of their rural settlement. As with Marina’s practice, Deligny’s tracing was a purely autonomic gesture, a recording machine. Leon Hilton writes of the educator’s work: “The tracings soon became a central aspect of the group’s activities, and the maps grew steadily more detailed and elaborate [...] No attempt was made to interfere with [the children’s] movements, or to explain or interpret them. The focus remained on the process of tracing itself.”2

Deligny’s cartographic tracings are emblematic of his pursuit of “‘the network as a mode of being’...focused on ‘tracing’ the trajectories, detours, and wander lines that compose a given social milieu.”3 In his tracings, as with Marina’s, we witness “an epistemological slackening of the distinction between the human subject and the nonhuman forces it encounters in a given environment.”4 This focus on the network mirrors Marina’s own responsive design for her artist’s books in A Partial History. She writes: “The re-created books become a site of distributed agency, with the marks simultaneously depending on and referencing human, animal, intentional, unintentional, and natural marks. There is no longer one autonomous subject making the work but rather a network of subjects and objects that encounter each other through space and time.”

Although both Marina and Deligny strive to exist in the background, bent forward in the task of mechanical reproduction, they are critical to their networks. Their lines provide a poignant refrain to their subjects’ original movements through encounters that revolve around responsiveness and collaboration. Deligny and his colleagues traced the students’ movements in the field,

in real time, and used their work to advocate for radical integration with neurodiverse populations. Through A Partial History, Marina summons her ancestors back to the page by resurrecting the traces of their touch in the aging schoolbooks. As a result, a melody emerges among the printed word, the handled word, and the recreated word – among the books, their handling, and their recasting. Through Marina’s refrain, a new language emerges.

This too, has Delignean echoes, for the educator was intent on breaking with the authority of language, a domain that remained out of reach for many of the students with whom he worked. Hilton writes of Deligny’s tracings: “Before phrases, words, and letters can form, there must first be lines. Tracing the quotidian trajectories of his autistic collaborators, it seems, was an attempt to return to writing’s origins, before it became codified or standardized, and when it still resembled the outlines of things encountered in moving through the world.”5

Marina’s work is a visual translation of material history. Through her own archive of abstract lines, Marina rewrites her family’s old textbooks in a new language, one that is distilled to its essential form, paradoxically illegible yet open to endless interpretation. A Partial History invites us not only to reimagine how we perceive the past, but also to challenge its formal narrative, to extend our own interpretation, to author our own stories.

Central to the artist’s exhibition at NARS Foundation is a series of large paper scrolls, some over 80 inches in length. One hangs from the wall, while others are arranged on the floor horizontally or vertically, standing over 50 inches tall. The works are lifesize, sculptural, and made through a time-intensive process in which Marina projects pages of the tracings in her artist’s books onto a wall, at ten times magnification, and begins to layer pages on top of each other. One page at a time,

she first traces all of the collective marks from each book’s even-numbered pages onto one side of the paper, and then all of the marks from the odd-numbered pages onto the reverse side. The result is one double-sided drawing per book, an intense compression of time and space made visible through accumulated graphite lines that suggest subtle topographies.

In making these works, Marina thought of ruins, and indeed, the scrolls appear like columns in the space, toppled and upright, etched with fine lines. The works also have a bodily presence, evoking the artist’s family members whose existences are otherwise sensed metonymically through their books. Standing and prone, the pieces hold a potent double meaning, referencing the pillars of the artist’s family, the progenitors of A Partial History. The viewer encounters these pieces through movement, “reading” the works as they reposition their own bodies in space. The original texts are unrecognizable, rendered as their most basic element: a single page. Folded in on themselves like shy neighbors, the works keep their secrets, and offer only glimpses.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, viewers are invited to read. They circulate through the space as though it is a library, picking up and handling each of the artist’s books on display, engaging with the tactility of the pages, even leaving their own traces in an accretive and quietly performative continuation of the work. However, the viewers are not only cast towards a potential future of A Partial History, but also critically rooted in its past, with the readers doubling as proxies for Marina and her initial experience of encountering her ancestors’ books.

On the gallery wall hang four high resolution photographs, images depicting interior spreads from the original books in Marina’s family collection. The photos have a haptic quality, displaying in sharp detail the lines of Greek text and small marks Marina has pored over for

endless hours. These images are our only window into the source for A Partial History. One photo depicts the first page from a crumbling history of Cyprus, one of the first books in Greek ever published on the topic. Another opens to a history of the world, told in 248 pages in the year 1882. Though Marina’s artist’s books and large paper works bring what is between the lines to the forefront, here, the import of the original texts provides a critical counterpoint to A Partial History.

In English, we distinguish between story and history, but in Greek, the word historia signifies that history is a story and a story is also a history. Through the original texts and Marina’s works, we witness the slippage between these grand and intimate narratives, between formal, preconceived notions of History, and the lesser known stories of a life, prone to hyperbole, gaps in memory, shifts in perspective. Just as we are invited to read the works in A Partial History, to reimagine how we perceive and encounter language and form, here we are also invited to reimagine the narratives contained in the original 19th and 20th century texts.

The schoolbooks were published in Greece during Cyprus’s existence under British colonial rule, a period that would have significant consequences for ultranationalism across the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot populations who live in the divided country to this day. Under British rule, numerous Greek Cypriots pursued enosis, union with Greece, while many Turkish Cypriots developed a separate right to self-determination as a Turkish state, or taksim. Reading them today, the aging texts offer a window into a critical moment when nationalist identities were promoted through local education in Cyprus, with lasting effects. Yet the vessels for this once-important knowledge are rapidly decaying –the books have become tattered artifacts, precious to their inheritor only for their proximity to her ancestors, bearing

histories that are constantly being rewritten. Tim Ingold writes, “the world we inhabit is originating all the time.”6 He examines an artifact’s iterative cycles of use since its creation – or beyond –when its materials existed in raw natural form, pointing, for example, to “the desk…[which] has not remained unaltered by use. Generations of writers have worn and scratched its surface. Here and there, the wood has cracked and split, due to fluctuations of temperature and humidity, or been restored with filler and glue. How can we distinguish those alterations that result from use and repair, from those that are intrinsic to the process of manufacture?”7

A Partial History illustrates this continuous rebirth – for Marina’s work not only responds to and posits its own existence amid the material history of her ancestors, but also adds a contemporary perspective, a quiet act of resistance against dominant historical narratives. In subverting the texts’ original language, and instead elevating subtle traces of the books’ inevitable passage through time, she knocks on the hollow husk of a propagandistic tool and shows us there may be another way of rethinking identity, and our relation to it.

Critically, Marina achieves this by reminding us that every history can only be partial. For the artist is not just an artist, not just a collector, but also a curator, consciously choosing what to reveal and what to obscure, pointedly telling a story through lacunae, through absence. This is the story of the exhibition: a story told through loss and emptiness, through traces of objects and individuals who are not present. By withholding the original texts, Marina is intentional in how she reconstitutes new forms of knowledge through the addition of her volumes to the family archive, and leaves us pondering the evolution of the work, when future descendants may respond to it.

It is this sense of an intergenerational continuum that defines A Partial History – a network distributed across family, time, and nature, between accident and intention, through form, language, and meaning. It is a call and response between ancestors and the artist, and an invitation for the viewer to carry forward the refrain. Ingold writes: “The proper meaning of tradition is not to live in the past but to follow those who have gone before you into the future. You may be retracing old ways, but every tracing is an original movement to be followed in its turn.”8

Though Marina’s faithful tracings are an homage to the past through a quiet but emphatic participation in the present, in making them, her work is immediately historicized. Rosalind Krauss writes of the mark-maker: “[E]ven at the time the marker strikes, he understands that the mark he makes can only take the form of a clue. He delivers his mark over to a future that will be carried on without his presence, and in so doing his mark cuts his presence away from himself, dividing it from within into a before and an after.”9

Marina’s artist’s books are a self-conscious recognition of this fact. In remaking the family archive, she acknowledges that her own contributions will flow and fade with time, that her works might inspire others even as they fall apart. A Partial History has become Marina’s life’s work in a sense, and one that she may never complete. As she slowly progresses through remaking each book from the family collection, other volumes are discovered, or new ideas arise. The target is always shifting, the project expands in time, the process of making becomes a continuum in which we are always resuming the unfinished.

As I look at the rusted bolt that sits on my shelf, I imagine the history of how it came to be: this basic cog of industry, forged and cut, heated and hardened. I think

of it taking its place in a once-roiling factory, spinning through cacophonous clangs of metal and shouts of workers. I envision my great-grandfather walking through the cavernous building, passing it, perhaps touching it. I recollect my journey to bring it home, across a wide expanse of sky, over land, deep into the heart of a place once traversed by my ancestors, in a territory that is constantly remaking itself. I look at the bolt and I think of how we follow footsteps to chart our own journeys. I think of the stories it may tell to my children one day, through the history of my pilgrimage. I think of what is old becoming new, what is lost becoming found.

1. Tim Ingold, “The Turn of the Present and the Future’s Past,” e-flux Horizons, September 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/ architecture/horizons/491223/the-turn-of-the-present-and-thefuture-s-past/.

2. Leon Hilton, “Mapping the Wander Lines: The Quiet Revelations of Fernand Deligny,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2, 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mapping-thewander-lines-the-quiet-revelations-of-fernand-deligny/.

3. Idem.

4. Idem.

5. Idem.

6. Tim Ingold, “No more ancient, no more human: the future past of archaeology and anthropology,” in Archaeology and Anthropology: Past, Present and Future, ed. David Shankland, (London: Berg, 2012).

7. Idem.

8. Tim Ingold, “The Turn of the Present and the Future’s Past,” e-flux Horizons, September 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/ architecture/horizons/491223/the-turn-of-the-present-and-thefuture-s-past/.

9. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 260.

Histories / Stories / Ιστορίες / Historíes

Marina Kassianidou

“Books are things that hold things.”1 They are also things that are held.

Several years ago, while spending time in my late grandmother’s house in Nicosia, Cyprus, I came across a group of old books that my grandmother, my γιαγιά, had kept. They were tucked away on the top shelf of a bookcase in the living room of her house. There were forty-four books in total, published between the early 19th and early 20th century. Most of them were schoolbooks used by my γιαγιά, grandfather, great-uncle, and greatgrandfather. I never met the last three.

This discovery led to the ongoing work A Partial History, which began in 2016—as I was leaving Cyprus, my home country, and immigrating to the US. The work involves re-creating the marks of use and time found in these books. I “re-read” each book as a material object rather than a text, paying attention to marks such as folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations due to time, pencil marks, and wormholes. I trace around these marks by hand, one page at a time. I then print the tracings in actual size, identical in size to the marks in the original books. These prints are bound into new books containing solely the excavated marks. The only parts of the printed text that are retained are the page numbers. The re-created books become alternative “history” books, recording the history of handling of each original book. The “reading” that I perform takes the form of observing and touching. My drawn lines—the marking tool an extension of my hand—trace over and repeat the marks of others. This reading is also a simultaneous “writing” or “re-writing” since the traces on each page are

converted into drawn lines that delineate their edges. In many cases, this delineation is only an approximation. How does one decide where and how a stain or smudge ends? Inevitably, the tracing on each page is accompanied by a series of decisions that attempt to turn these equivocal, unstable, and subtle traces into lines, an attempt, perhaps, to partially fix them in place and time.

Tracing, as a mode of marking, is oftentimes seen as copying or it is associated with a mechanical mode of working, which is traditionally thought to undermine the artist’s hand and subjective expression.2 The activity of tracing is far removed from discourses of “expressive” pictorialism, “originality,” “personalized authorial moment,” or “artistic mastery” that may traditionally be associated with drawing and painting. Instead, the act of tracing depends on the character of the thing being traced. At the same time, and because of this dependence on something pre-existing, tracing can be used as a tool for learning how to draw or for refining drawings.3

These two approaches to tracing coincide in my actions when making these works. Tracing over a preexisting mark implies following that mark closely, aiming for an almost one-to-one mapping where I am trying to capture some aspect of the surface and its features more accurately. In a sense, I am almost turning myself into a recording machine. While making these works, I have found myself sitting for hours, bent over the pages of each book, my body just a few inches from it. My movements are controlled and restrained, small and relatively still, almost as if emulating the stillness of the page. The extended time spent with each book while drawing leads to an increased familiarity over time, an increased sensitization to its surfaces. The more I observe and draw, the more variations and pre-existing marks I can detect. Each page unfolds itself over time. This way of working suggests an embodied mode of knowing and experiencing—handling the objects and their marks,

“touching” them, “feeling” their details, preserving some while erasing others.

The word “observation,” Jacques Derrida writes, “associates scopic attention with respect, with deference, with the attention of a gaze or look that also knows how to look after.”4 My marks observe the pre-existing marks, come after them, and attempt to remake them, becoming tracings and traces of them. Perhaps the remaking, this careful and partial fixing in space and time, can be seen as a looking after—literally following after something but also taking care of something.

The printed and bound drawings act as “signs of attention,” to borrow Griselda Pollock’s phrase.5 Rather than being just signs of things in the world or signs of the artist’s subjectivity, they draw attention to the original traces as well as to the location of those traces on the pages of books. In that sense, they become indexical, acting as imprints of those traces, isolating and pointing to them. Indexes, Rosalind Krauss writes, “establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.”6

The drawn and printed marks on the pages of the re-created books point to the original traces on the pages of the old books, traces which, in turn, point to the people, processes, or creatures that brought them into being. At the same time, the drawn and printed marks point, however subtly, to the artist’s hand that drew them. These “others” are connected through the mark—the trace of several others and not only my trace. The re-created books become a site of distributed agency, with the marks simultaneously depending on and referencing human, animal, intentional, unintentional, and natural marks. There is no longer one autonomous subject making the work but rather a network of subjects and objects that encounter each other through space and time.

Books are sequences of spaces, sequences of moments.7

At some point in time, I began seeing my process of re-creating these books as a form of translation, a way of going “under the skin;”8 “digging for months and months in the same tunnel.”9 Furthering this process of translation, I began making two-sided graphite drawings based on the book tracings. These drawings on textured paper are about ten-time magnifications of the tracings and average 6 feet in height by 4 feet in width, referencing human scale. One drawing corresponds to one book. On one side, I draw all the marks from the odd pages superimposed and on the other side all the marks from the even pages. The accumulated lines compress time, revealing its effects all at once. These drawings treat each page as a space and bring together all the moments in which it has been traversed by the body or action of someone or something.

As all the traces become thin black and grey lines in the re-created books and large drawings, the source of each mark is partially concealed. In the re-created books, the traces are partially converted into printed characters, belonging to a new, different, unreadable language. The surface or materiality of each page becomes the language through which the page/book/object can tell its own story. The printed drawings are quite literally re-marks, repetitions of other marks that they have traced over, but they also become remarks—potentially a different kind of written and/or drawn commentary. In the magnified drawings, the traces become terrain, maps of space, time, movement. All traces are partially retrieved, turned into pathways that bridge past and present, then and now, there and here. Presence co-exists with absence and our stories, our attempts to hold and to hold onto, are always already partial.

1. Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).

2. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 142, 151; Jordan Kantor, Drawing from the Modern: 1975–2005 (New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 17.

3. Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 166. Also see, 260–285.

4. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 60.

5. Griselda Pollock, “Oeuvres Autistes,” Versus, no. 3 (1994): 17.

6. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 70.

7. Ulises Carrión, The New Art of Making Books (Nicosia: AEGEAN Editions, 2001).

8. Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 7.

9. Italo Calvino, “On Translation,” in The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York, NY: Mariner Classics, 2002), 52.

Works

A Partial History (Book III), 2024

Archival inkjet print on 308gsm matt rag paper

15.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches (framed)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

A Partial History (Book V), 2024

Archival inkjet print on 308gsm matt rag paper

15.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches (framed)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

A Partial History (Book VI), 2024

Archival inkjet print on 308gsm matt rag paper

15.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches (framed)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

A Partial History (Book VIII), 2024

Archival inkjet print on 308gsm matt rag paper

15.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches (framed)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

A Partial History (Vol. III), 2023

Artist’s book of inkjet prints on 104gsm smooth matt paper

7.05 x 4.76 x 1 inches (dimensions of closed book)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

A Partial History (Vol. V), 2024

Artist’s book of inkjet prints on 104gsm smooth matt paper

7.36 x 5.16 x 1 inches (dimensions of closed book)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

A Partial History (Vol. VI), 2024

Artist’s book of inkjet prints on 104gsm smooth matt paper

9.53 x 5.91 x 0.91 inches (dimensions of closed book)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

A Partial History (Vol. VIII), 2023

Artist’s book of inkjet prints on 104gsm smooth matt paper

8.58 x 5.71 x 1.02 inches (dimensions of closed book)

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

Stands, 2024 (four pieces)

Red oak, red oak plywood

34 x 15.5 x 18 inches

A Partial History (Drawing III), 2023

Graphite on 300gsm rough press watercolor paper, red oak

66 x 43.3 inches (dimensions of drawing)

54 x 0.75 x 0.75 inches (dimensions of wooden holder)

A Partial History (Drawing V), 2024

Graphite on 300gsm rough press watercolor paper, red oak

69.29 x 47.24 inches (dimensions of drawing)

48.625 x 10.5 x 7 inches (dimensions of wooden holder)

A Partial History (Drawing VI), 2024

Graphite on 300gsm rough press watercolor paper, red oak

88.07 x 53.15 inches (dimensions of drawing)

54.5 x 10.5 x 7 inches (dimensions of wooden holder)

A Partial History (Drawing VIII), 2023

Graphite on 300gsm rough press watercolor paper, red oak

81.89 x 52.75 inches (dimensions of drawing)

55.25 x 7.25 x 0.75 inches (dimensions of wooden holder)

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the NARS Foundation for the opportunity to exhibit my work in the Project Space. Special thanks to Junho Lee, Katherine Plourde, and Seoyoung Kim for all their help.

I am deeply grateful and honored to be collaborating with Mary Annunziata, who engaged with the work in incredible depth and with immense thoughtfulness. Thank you for the conversations, your thoughts, and your words.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the making of the work in various ways: mom, dad, Vassos Stylianou, Marina Yerali, Mike Womack, William Rumley, Thomas Yi. It would not have happened in the same way without your help.

Thank you to all the spaces and curators that supported the work by including parts of it in exhibitions: Elena Stylianou, Artemis Eleftheriadou, Yiannis Toumazis, and NiMAC; Ian Weaver and Moreau Center for the Arts; Marcel Pardo Ariza and Axis Gallery; The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2020 curatorial team: Mary Annunziata, Allison Cannella, Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, Katya Grokhovsky; Cassidy Petrazzi and Gardiner Gallery; Yasmeen Siddiqui and the Katonah Museum of Art; Brooke Tomiello and Lane Meyer Projects.

The work in the exhibition was supported, in part, by a CHA Faculty Fellowship from the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, and by a RIO Arts & Humanities Grant from the Research & Innovation Office at the University of Colorado Boulder. I am immensely grateful for the support. Special thanks to

my fellow CHA fellows for their time and feedback.

Part of the work presented was completed during artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, The Studios at MASS MoCA, and Ox-Bow. Thank you for the time and space and thank you to the staff and to my fellow artists for their feedback and sharing of ideas. Moreover, I presented the work for critiques during NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. Thank you to the staff and to my fellow participants for their comments. Special thanks to Kate Speer, my mentor during NYFA’s program.

Thank you to family, friends, and colleagues whose support—whether going for a hike when things get stressful, talking on the phone, covering for my classes, driving me and my work around, coming for studio visits, or offering a place to stay while traveling—enables me to be an artist. Thank you especially to mom, dad, νονά, aunts Elena and Taso, Mike, Alvin, Liana, Louis, Annette, Bob, Megan, Kirstin, Claire, Zamzam, Melanie, Clark, Ethan, Erin.

A Partial History

Marina Kassianidou

With a text by Mary Annunziata

Published as part of the exhibition A Partial History, April 12 to May 15, 2024, NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, New York, USA.

Exhibition Credits:

The photography of the books was completed at 6 x 6 Center for Photography, Limassol, Cyprus, founded by Vassos Stylianou.

The book photographs were printed with the assistance of Thomas Yi, Art & Art History Print Lab, University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado, USA.

The book photographs were framed by Mercury Framing, Boulder, Colorado, USA.

The artist’s books were hand bound by Marina Yerali / Pinna Nobilis Bookworks, Limassol, Cyprus.

The book stands and drawing holders were designed and constructed with the help of Emilios Kassianides, Maro Kassianidou, William Rumley, and Mike Womack.

The works shown in this publication were photographed by Marina Kassianidou, Vassos Stylianou (pages 1–7, 86–94) , and Erynn McConnell (pages 60–63).

The work was supported, in part, by a CHA Faculty Fellowship from the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, and by a RIO Arts & Humanities Grant from the Research & Innovation Office at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Marina Kassianidou was born in Limassol, Cyprus, and lives and works between Limassol and Boulder, Colorado, USA.

She received a B.A. in Studio Art from Stanford University, an M.A. in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and a Ph.D. in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, London, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally at spaces such as the House of Cyprus (Athens, Greece), NiMAC (Nicosia, Cyprus), Thkio Ppalies (Nicosia, Cyprus), Tenderpixel Gallery (London, UK), Stand4 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Yes Ma’am Projects (Denver, CO), Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO), and Rule Gallery (Marfa, TX). She has been awarded residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Hambidge Center, OxBow, and The Studios at MASS MoCA, among others. She is a recipient of the 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.

Mary Annunziata is an interdisciplinary writer who focuses on art’s intersections with conflict, migration, diasporic identity, and emerging technologies. She holds an MA in Critical & Curatorial Studies from Columbia University and has worked for arts and nonprofit institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, the Artist Protection Fund, and Access Now. Mary is based in Brooklyn, New York.