Please join us for our Project X residency show with local artists, Mikaella Socratous and Anastasia Fainberg
Mikaella Socratous (b. 1997) is a multidisciplinary artist, who crafts surreal, psychological landscapes where perception fractures and meaning remains fluid. With a background in Interior Architecture, Classical Realism, and Art Direction, Socratous bridges these with psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience to participate in the puzzle-making that holds them together. At the core of her practice is speculative world-building—an excavation of internal landscapes shaped by memory, dream logic, and emotional residue. These realms, drawn from mutant steampunk aesthetics and cognitive dissonance, blend rusted futures with organic anomalies, forming environments that feel both alien and intimately known. She engages with the visual language of spatial tension and curated chaos, using installation, painting, sculpture, narrative, and video to probe the thresholds of consciousness, myth, and machine.
Socratous has exhibited internationally in both solo and group shows such as BIP: Imaginarium Park, Okay Space, Curated by Fabian Nelsus & Orestis Telemachou (Group Show, Athens, 2025), Radical Rest, Curated by Captain Stavros & Vassiliki Kaga, Okay Space (Group Show, Athens, 2025), Sweet Liminal Space, Curated by Mikaella Socratous & Orestis Telemachou (Self organised Group Exhibition, 2023), Pleasure Hunt, Acropolis Park, Curated by Emily Petridou (Solo Exhibition, Nicosia, 2022), The Room, Off-site Project (Solo Exhibition, Nicosia, 2016) amongst others.
She has been awarded with the Velocity Award - Best Short film (UK, 2019). Socratous has designed and led courses in various educational contexts, such as Memeraki Artist Space, Art Hub Laboratories and Glasgow Fringe.
In addition to her fine art practice, she has worked with brands and clients such as Adidas Originals, Caramel Films, Lidl, Make Music Cyprus Festival, She’s Got Brass amongst many others as an art director, set designer and production designer. She recently completed her Master’s in Art Direction (Labasad, Barcelona) and is working on a new body of work continuing her interrogation in exploring omniversal space, affective memory, and the aesthetics of the unknown.
Anastasia Fainberg (b. 1995, Moscow) is an artist, photographer,
and set designer based in Limassol, Cyprus. Her practice centers on the dialogue between the ephemerality of nature and the transience of human emotion. Through organic materials, sculptural forms, and sensory metaphors, often involving food, flora, and found objects. She creates contemplative spaces that invite emotional and tactile perception. Her work draws on early experiences of finding comfort in nature, weaving personal memory with universal themes of transformation and synesthesia. Her projects have been exhibited at the Noorderlicht Photo Festival (Netherlands), MMOMA (Russia), the PH Museum (Italy), and 212 Photography Festival (Turkey). She has taken part in Cosmoscow and Blazar art fairs, and collaborated with brands such as Zara Home.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle Decoration, Fisheye, and other international publications.
At the core of Anastasia’s artistic practice is a dialogue between the transience of nature and the fleeting quality of human emotions. She works across diverse forms and materials — from organic matter to sculptural objects, crafting works where time seems to pause, inviting the viewer into a space of heightened sensory awareness.
Anastasia’s connection to nature is deeply personal, rooted in childhood memories of finding solace during solitary forest walks. These moments of quiet reflection continue to inspire her, surfacing in her art through recurring use of natural motifs and materials. Her fascination with synesthesia , the blending of senses where one sensation evokes another, guides her exploration of emotional perception. In her work, flowers, fruits, and food become poetic symbols of emotional states: delicate, ephemeral, and ever changing. Food, in Anastasia’s projects, transcends its material function to become a universal language of memory and a vessel of collective experience. Through a deliberate recontextualization of familiar objects, she constructs new relationships between form and meaning, weaving connections between the personal and the shared, the tangible and the emotional.
Also check out other Arts events in Limassol, Festivals in Limassol, Exhibitions in Limassol.
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