You are warmly invited to MeMeraki’s Annual Group Show in Limassol, curated by Katerina Rebello-Savvides, celebrating the power of color and bold artistic voices. Featuring a dynamic collection of paintings and sketchbooks from past residency artists, this exhibition offers an intimate glimpse into fearless creativity and vibrant expression. Join us in Limassol to experience a visual dialogue that honors individuality, imagination, and the transformative spirit of contemporary art.
Artists participating in Limassol on the 29th May include:
Lucy Ananieva
Lucy Ananieva is a multidisciplinary artist from Moscow, currently based in Cyprus. Her practice spans illustration, collage, and ceramics, with a current focus on painterly collage and self-made artist books. Trained in collage by Alexandra Vorozhko, she brings an intuitive and tactile approach to composition, often merging hand-painted textures with found materials to explore themes of memory, transformation, and inner states. She has participated in artist residencies at Memeraki (Limassol, 2020) and GetArtFit (2025). Her work reflects a personal visual language rooted in sensitivity to form, texture, and emotional nuance.
"Unfolding"
This ongoing body of work is rooted in intuitive exploration and deep attention to the creative process itself. Created over the past two years, the collages and artist books presented here emerge from a practice of spontaneous composition — often without a clear idea or plan at the start. Trusting the process to guide the outcome, I allow for accident, experimentation, and internal response to lead the way.
The materials I use — including text fragments, magazine cuttings, personal photographs, found papers, hand-drawn elements, and stamps — are chosen for their emotional resonance and tactile presence. Some are created in handmade books, others in found notebooks selected by feel, memory, or atmosphere. The work unfolds much like a diary: personal, reflective, layered.
What connects these pieces is a desire to step away from control and perfectionism and instead enter a space where creative flow becomes a kind of inner movement — meditative, freeing, and sometimes surprising. This process-centered approach is new for me, in contrast to earlier works that followed clearer conceptual plans.
These collages are an attempt to listen — to inner states, unconscious rhythms, shifting emotions, memory, and imagination. They are a quiet yet powerful act of self-reflection and self-trust. For me, the process is both a practice and a form of art therapy — a way to inhabit a freer, more alive, and more honest part of myself.
Sotos Ioannides
Sotos Ioannides was born in Limassol, Cyprus, in 1991. After completing his five-year studies in painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (2012–2017), he returned to Cyprus, where he established his personal studio, Yiakazoui.
Sotos has exhibited his works in a variety of mediums, including paintings, drawings, video art, and performance. He has also completed murals in public schools and has taught a select group of students at his studio. To date, he has presented three solo exhibitions and has participated in numerous group exhibitions both in Cyprus and Greece. Sotos was a resident artist at Memeraki (September – December 2021). He currently lives and works in Limassol, Cyprus.
"Painting"
Painting, for me, is survival — a raw confrontation with the forces moving under the surface. Every mark, every layer of color is a collision between instinct and memory, between the weight of experience and the chaos of the unknown. Influenced by the emotional urgency of Munch, the structural force of Cézanne, the fierce materiality of Dubuffet and Auerbach, and the wild immediacy of Basquiat and Appel, I approach the canvas with an urgency that refuses polish.
My work is born from a need to tap into what lies beneath conscious thought. Psychology, especially the theories of Carl Jung, informs the way I move through the process — allowing symbols, figures, and landscapes to emerge from somewhere deeper than reason. I don't begin with a plan. I begin with an impulse: a color, a stroke, a scratch. The paintings unfold in a language I don't fully control — and that's the point. They are not illustrations of ideas. They are living surfaces where something buried can find its way up.
I work primarily with acrylic paint, but the medium is never fixed. Spray paint, oil pastels, markers, oil paint — whatever feels right in the moment gets pulled into the battle. I believe in the physical act of making: layering, scraping, staining, obliterating, rebuilding. Every surface carries its own wounds and histories. Texture isn’t decoration — it’s evidence of struggle, of change, of something having happened.
Color is weaponized emotion. It’s not about describing the world outside but pushing at the seams of the world inside. Sometimes colors clash brutally; sometimes they barely hold together. I embrace contradiction, believing that true feeling is almost always messy, unstable, impossible to pin down neatly.
Figures sometimes appear — half-formed, distorted, angelic, monstrous. They come and go, like memories or dreams that refuse clear shape. I’m not interested in clear narratives or easy resolutions. I want the work to feel like stepping into the middle of something unfolding — something familiar and foreign at once.
This body of work, made over the past two years, is a record of instability, searching, and transformation. It's a reminder that identity itself is not a fixed thing, but a shifting set of forces, impulses, fears, and hopes colliding and mutating over time.
In a world addicted to surface and speed, I fight to hold onto something slower, rougher, more human. Painting, for me, is an act of resistance — against forgetting, against disconnection, against smoothing everything down to something consumable. I’m reaching for the raw pulse underneath it all.
Each piece is an invitation, not a statement. A place to get lost. A place to remember that we're all carrying more inside us than we know.
Kristina Tzeortziana Karagianni
My work explores the journey of human life through three distinct phases: childhood, adulthood, and maturity. In this body of work, I experiment with interactivity as a way to engage memory, identity, and personal narrative. The first two parts consist of painted pieces shaped like puzzle fragments, made of wood and magnets, placed on metal surfaces. Viewers are invited to touch, move, and rearrange the pieces — either recreating the original image I propose or composing something entirely their own. This interaction becomes an act of co-creation, as well as a reflection on our ability to reshape our own stories and recreate the image of our present self guided by the best possible version.
The third part, painted on canvas, functions as a stable, unchanging image. It reflects the stage of maturity, where life begins to settle and solidify into a narrative full of memories. There is no longer room for transformation — only acceptance. It is a deeply personal depiction: a portrait of my parents’ daily life as I experience it. Each painted composition is a memory, a fragment of their home, of the quiet, repetitive moments that are etched in my mind with tenderness and melancholia.
Through this project, I explore how the past shapes us, how adult life searches for identity, and how, ultimately, memories turn into images that carry the essence of our existence.
Kristina Tzeortziana Karagianni is a visual artist based in Cyprus, originally from Greece. She studied Painting at the School of Fine Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and holds a Master’s degree in Art Theory and History from the Cyprus University of Technology. Her artistic practice focuses on memory, identity, and human experience, through painting, interactive works, and mixed media. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Cyprus, Greece, and Spain.
Ya Wen Chien
Ya Wen Chien is a visual artist, illustrator, and performer born in Taiwan and currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MA in Digital Media from Bristol, England. Her primary mediums include traditional art forms such as watercolor, acrylic, charcoal, and ink, as well as animation, found footage, and film. Her work has been exhibited in Taiwan, South Korea, and North America.
As a shadow puppeteer and designer, she has performed with ShadowLight Productions in works such as The Rebirth of Apsara, Feathers of Fire, and Shadows for Carlos Villa, and co-led the design of Sojourner ZY, a modern sci-fi shadow play. Ya Wen is also a key collaborator with the Facing West Shadows collective, contributing to a wide range of innovative installations, films, and performances.
Aureen Almario
Aureen Almario (she/her/siya) is an educator and artist. She is an Asian American Studies and theater arts adjunct faculty member at various Bay Area colleges and universities, as well as a freelance teaching artist for K–12. She is currently the Artistic Director of Bindlestiff Studio, where she has trained in acting, directing, playwriting, puppetry, and comedy since 2004.
She is the co-founder of the sketch comedy troupe Granny Cart Gangstas and a founding member of the shadow puppetry group Brownout Shadow Collective. During the 2020 quarantine, she developed virtual programming through the Kwento Times Staged Reading Series and co-produced FOBcast. As the lead facilitator for the Restorative Theater Arts for Seniors program, she has produced the yearly showcase Senior Arts Moment since 2018. She was also the performance director for the SOMA Pilipinas multi-organisation collaboration for MUMU’s Tern Out for Terno—a theatrical fashion presentation.
Her latest puppetry projects include Shadows for Carlos Villa with ShadowLight Productions, which she co-directed with Larry Reed; Kumukutikutitap, a commissioned online video for the Parol Stroll Festival; and being the lead puppetry designer for Black Benatar’s Black Magic Cabaret. She is also an ensemble member for Pickles and The Ground with Odd Savvy Production and is currently developing a multidisciplinary performance art project, Bulong.
Also check out other Arts events in Limassol, Fine Arts events in Limassol, Exhibitions in Limassol.
