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Stay updated.",{"html":63},"\u003Cp>By subscribing to our newsletter you are agreeing to receiving updates and communications from Ibraaz.\u003C/p>",{"entries":65},[66],{"uri":67,"title":68,"typeHandle":69},"ibraaz-publishing/read/ghost-in-the-vitrine","Ghost in the Vitrine","longForm",{"globalSet":71},{"id":72,"handle":73,"linksGroups":74},"128","navigation",[75,81,112,118,124,130,136],{"title":76,"entry":77,"links":80},"What’s On",[78],{"uri":79},"whats-on",[],{"title":82,"entry":83,"links":86},"Publishing",[84],{"uri":85},"ibraaz-publishing",[87,92,97,102,107],{"title":88,"entry":89},"Writing Gaza",[90],{"uri":91},"ibraaz-publishing/writing-gaza",{"title":93,"entry":94},"Mission Statement",[95],{"uri":96},"ibraaz-publishing/mission-statement",{"title":98,"entry":99},"Read",[100],{"uri":101},"ibraaz-publishing/read",{"title":103,"entry":104},"Watch",[105],{"uri":106},"ibraaz-publishing/watch",{"title":108,"entry":109},"Listen",[110],{"uri":111},"ibraaz-publishing/listen",{"title":113,"entry":114,"links":117},"Visit Us",[115],{"uri":116},"visit-us",[],{"title":119,"entry":120,"links":123},"About Us",[121],{"uri":122},"about-us",[],{"title":125,"entry":126,"links":129},"Oula: Café-in-Residence",[127],{"uri":128},"oula-cafe",[],{"title":131,"entry":132,"links":135},"Maktaba: Bookshop-in-Residence",[133],{"uri":134},"maktaba-bookshop-in-residence",[],{"title":137,"entry":138,"links":141},"Contact Us",[139],{"uri":140},"contact-us",[],{"globalSet":143},{"id":144,"handle":145,"heading":12,"richText":146},"11","gdpr",{"html":147},"\u003Cp>We use cookies to give you the best experience. By clicking 'Accept' you consent to the use of all cookies. \u003Ca href=\"/privacy-policy\">Privacy Policy\u003C/a>.\u003C/p>",{"entry":149},{"id":150,"uri":67,"title":68,"slug":151,"postDate":152,"typeHandle":69,"sectionHandle":153,"meta":154,"readCategories":157,"writeCategories":161,"missionCategories":162,"figure":163,"pdf":164,"authorInfo":165,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":12,"richDescription":170,"richExcerpt":12,"image":172,"externalLinks":180,"entrySections":181,"related":288},"19452","ghost-in-the-vitrine","2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00","read",[155],{"title":68,"description":12,"image":156},[],[158],{"title":159,"slug":160},"Visual Thinking","visualthinking",[],[],[],[],[166],{"authorName":167,"authorBio":168},"Marina Ashioti",{"html":169},"\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Marina Ashioti\u003C/strong> is a Cypriot writer and artist based in London. She is currently working as an editor at \u003Ci>Little White Lies\u003C/i>, where she writes a print column on queer visual culture. She is part of Endrosia, an interdisciplinary collective named after a Cypriot phrase that expresses the sense of relief prompted when an evening breeze seeps through the island’s suffocating summer heat. The collective’s research-led projects are fuelled by a fluid, collaborative practice tied to decolonial, queer, and feminist streams of thought.\u003C/p>",{"html":171},"\u003Cp>An image of an empty display cabinet triggers a series of reflections on absence and (in)visibility in the context of Cyprus, an island where coloniality lingers in plain sight.\u003C/p>",[173],{"id":174,"path":175,"alt":12,"title":176,"width":177,"height":178,"mimeType":179},"19454","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-1.jpg","Fig 1",3024,4032,"image/jpeg",[],[182,196,200,213,223,232,235,245,248,266,269,275,283],{"typeHandle":183,"figures":184},"figures",[185,188],{"image":186,"caption":12},[187],{"id":174,"path":175,"alt":12,"title":176,"width":177,"height":178,"mimeType":179},{"image":189,"caption":194},[190],{"id":191,"path":192,"alt":12,"title":193,"width":177,"height":178,"mimeType":179},"19455","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-2.jpg","Fig 2",{"html":195},"\u003Cp>Display cabinets from the Cyprus Museum, 2024. Photos courtesy of Alexandros Xenophontos and Clio Alphas.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":197,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":198},"content",{"html":199},"\u003Cp>Alexandros sends me a message from the Cyprus Museum, attaching a photograph of a display cabinet. It holds no objects, only discoloured stains left behind on blue fabric lining in the shape of holes, a negative index of what it had once contained. At the time, our conversations in Endrosia Collective were focused on constructing the speculative shell agency, Forever Informed, which would eventually become the façade of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. A parafictional surveillance company in disarray, Forever Informed gave expression to the elusive and Promethean ambitions for a quantifiable future and a hubristic pursuit for information power.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">1\u003C/span>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The ever-pervasive traces of intercommunal conflict, as well as the historical legacies and infrastructures of militarisation and intelligence gathering that have instrumentalised Cyprus as Britain’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, made the display cabinet’s particular incantation of absence enticing to think about.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">2\u003C/span>On this geopolitical battleground, where coloniality remains dominant while evading perception, a well-fed, fertile Lernaean Hydra rears a number of its regenerative heads: from the resurgence of ethno-nationalisms and ethno-nihilisms, to the island’s embroilment and complicity in genocidal violence.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">3\u003C/span> The near-total destruction of Gaza has been a raging fire close enough to these shores that the ashes settle on the hands of those around us, while the island itself returns the gaze of those who imagine themselves as distant witnesses to a regional violence that the island has materially enabled. We are left before an opaque mirror where absence thickens into image, refusing to release the gaze from its burden, reflecting back proximity without granting it legibility.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":201,"image":202,"caption":209,"width":211,"ratio":212},"figure",[203],{"id":204,"path":205,"alt":12,"title":206,"width":207,"height":208,"mimeType":16},"19456","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-3.png","Fig 3",1920,1080,{"html":210},"\u003Cp>Point-cloud view from a LiDAR survey of the forested area surrounding RAF Troodos Signals Station in Cyprus depicting the camera’s scanning position. Part of a mapping exercise by Endrosia Collective for \u003Ci>On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare …\u003C/i> (2024). Scanned by cloudy.works.\u003C/p>","wide","landscape",{"typeHandle":201,"image":214,"caption":221,"width":211,"ratio":212},[215],{"id":216,"path":217,"alt":12,"title":218,"width":219,"height":220,"mimeType":16},"19457","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-4.png","Fig 4",2880,1800,{"html":222},"\u003Cp>Screenshot from user-uploaded content on Google Maps depicting a shortwave 'Curtain Antenna' array at RAF Akrotiri, part of the British Sovereign Base Areas, 2021.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":201,"image":224,"caption":230,"width":211,"ratio":212},[225],{"id":226,"path":227,"alt":12,"title":228,"width":219,"height":229,"mimeType":16},"19458","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-5.png","Fig 5",1380,{"html":231},"\u003Cp>Screenshot from user-uploaded content on Google Maps depicting the camera’s position in the shape of a black hole. Dreamer’s Bay, located in the Akrotiri Peninsula, part of the British Sovereign Base Areas, 2016.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":197,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":233},{"html":234},"\u003Cp>Approaching this tension between absence, reflection, and (in)visibility through the prism of an empty display cabinet left us with a slippery reliance on the power of suggestion alone. A vacant vitrine does not itself contain meaning, but reflects our own inquisitive gaze back upon itself, like a signal bouncing back to its sender. As a metaphor, it evoked Yves Klein’s singular empty vitrine presented in the 1958 exhibition \u003Ci>Le Vide\u003C/i>: a primary example of modern art’s pursuit of immateriality and emptiness as pure, transcendental abstraction; Taoist nothingness as exquisite plenitude, as liberation from matter.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The absence that we were drawn to had spiritually similar qualities to the unphotographed image that haunts Marguerite Duras in her 1984 novel \u003Ci>The Lover\u003C/i>: an almost mythical non-image embodying emotional truth rather than historical accuracy. In the opening chapter of the book, a photograph depicting the narrator as a young girl crossing the Mekong River is described in perfect detail, only for a confession to arrive that: ‘The image doesn’t exist. It was omitted. Forgotten ... And it’s to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">4\u003C/span>Absence becomes the condition allowing the image to exist at all: it is contradictory, present yet inaccessible, a hole implying a ‘could-have-been’, rather than the ‘has-been’ that Roland Barthes characterised as the essence of the photographic image – an intimation of a counterfactual world of desire residing in the gaps between images.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":201,"image":236,"caption":243,"width":211,"ratio":212},[237],{"id":238,"path":239,"alt":12,"title":240,"width":241,"height":242,"mimeType":179},"19459","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-6.jpg","Fig 6",768,578,{"html":244},"\u003Cp>Marguerite Duras, still from \u003Ci>Woman of the Ganges\u003C/i> (1974).\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":197,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":246},{"html":247},"\u003Cp>The speculative disaster that romantically washes history away in Mustafa Hulusi’s two-channel video installation \u003Ci>The Empty Near East \u003C/i>(2011) imagines such a gap so that the land can breathe a sigh of relief. The artist captures an unfettered Cypriot landscape in a free-flowing, perpetual present of post-historical placidity as a meditation on how the region is imagined, emptied, and reconstituted through Western desire, capital, and spectacle. Nature eclipses history as the island is left to its own devices, silence touching everything in its turn, ‘and in its way, and that was all’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">5\u003C/span>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yet the vistas of the Karpas Peninsula, idyllic but lying fallow, are palpably haunted by a pervasive without-ness, by traces of the images that could have been.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":183,"figures":249},[250,258],{"image":251,"caption":12},[252],{"id":253,"path":254,"alt":12,"title":255,"width":256,"height":257,"mimeType":179},"19460","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-7.jpg","Fig 7",700,394,{"image":259,"caption":264},[260],{"id":261,"path":262,"alt":12,"title":263,"width":256,"height":257,"mimeType":179},"19461","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-8.jpg","Fig 8",{"html":265},"\u003Cp>Mustafa Hulusi, \u003Ci>The Empty Near East\u003C/i> (2011). Courtesy of the artist.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":197,"richSubtitle":12,"richText":267},{"html":268},"\u003Cp>What force is exerted by absence, when the image bends back upon itself? In her poem, ‘My Darling Clementine’, Ioulita Toumazi writes: ‘I had a childhood of forbidden orange trees / remembered from a life that wasn’t mine.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">6\u003C/span> This forbidden memory is something we share: our grandmothers’ recollections of Varosha, the town of oranges and windmills, are ours and not ours. The seaside ghost town that they were displaced from is an image that for us is blurred, faded, corrupted.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">7\u003C/span>Language and sight are apart, so the ‘absolute image’ is necessarily absent, detached from explanation, unbound from continuity, impossible. It is an impossible language too, for to speak about this site of overlapping and suspended narratives in words that resist co-optation is Sisyphean and at odds with our need to create a memory of the future; a future that must be made in the very gaps where images refuse completion; where memory, history, and desire converge – not to be understood but held.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>And so we bend the eye towards vacancy: a glance might just be able to cast a light that causes the holes on the fabric within the vitrine to shift and widen. These image holes, through lack and incompleteness, communicate to an underworld that whispers back, an exchange coming together in a series of covert messages converging in a light that refuses capture.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":201,"image":270,"caption":12,"width":211,"ratio":212},[271],{"id":272,"path":273,"alt":12,"title":274,"width":207,"height":208,"mimeType":16},"19462","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-9.png","Fig 9",{"typeHandle":201,"image":276,"caption":281,"width":211,"ratio":212},[277],{"id":278,"path":279,"alt":12,"title":280,"width":207,"height":208,"mimeType":16},"19463","Ashioti_Marina_Visual-Thinking/Fig-10.png","Fig 10",{"html":282},"\u003Cp>Point-cloud views from a LiDAR survey of the forested area surrounding RAF Troodos Signals Station in Cyprus, depicting footstep imprints and particle glitches. Part of a mapping exercise by Endrosia Collective for \u003Ci>On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare …\u003C/i> (2024).\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":284,"title":285,"richText":286},"footnotes","Notes",{"html":287},"\u003Cp>Cyprus functions as a key site for the development of surveillance software and serves as a hub for exporting such systems.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Britain retains sovereignty over 3 percent of the island in the form of military enclaves, colonial remnants in the areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia that also serve as intelligence-gathering stations. Both the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) in the south and the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in the north retain their own military forces on the island, collocated with separate Turkish and Greek garrisons and UN Peacekeeping forces.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>A recent shift towards enhanced militarisation and an expanding alliance with Israel pursued by the current RoC government is incompatible with the state’s own narratives surrounding the division of the island, and is without clear ratification from the Cypriot electorate, raising concerns about democratic legitimacy and the potential ricochet of such strategies on the island.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Marguerite Duras, \u003Ci>The Lover \u003C/i>(1984), translated by Barbara Bray, Harper Perennial, 2006, p. 14.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Mustafa Hulusi, \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://mustafahulusi.com/the-empty-near-east/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Ci>The Empty Near East\u003C/i>\u003C/a>\u003Ci> \u003C/i>(2011).\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Ioulita Toumazi, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://thisunrealcountrycy.wordpress.com/2023/06/13/my-darling-clementine/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">My darling Clementine\u003C/a>’, 2023.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Varosha, the southern quarter of Famagusta, was abandoned following the 1974 Turkish military invasion and fenced off as a bargaining chip in endless peace negotiations, then re-opened as a dark tourism destination before plans for redevelopment and capital investment began to move forward.\u003C/p>",[289],{"title":12,"relatedEntries":290},[291,313,332],{"typeHandle":292,"entries":293},"channelsEntries",[294],{"title":295,"uri":296,"image":297,"readCategories":304,"writeCategories":308,"missionCategories":309,"authorInfo":310},"Algorithmic Visions: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare","ibraaz-publishing/read/algorithmic-visions-artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-warfare",[298],{"id":299,"path":300,"alt":12,"title":301,"width":302,"height":303,"mimeType":16},"5794","Algorithmic-Visions-Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Future-of-Warfare/Screenshot-2025-10-02-at-09.58.39.png","Screenshot 2025 10 02 at 09 58 39",1614,888,[305],{"title":306,"slug":307},"Essay","essay",[],[],[311],{"authorName":312},"Anthony Downey",{"typeHandle":292,"entries":314},[315],{"title":316,"uri":317,"image":318,"readCategories":325,"writeCategories":327,"missionCategories":328,"authorInfo":329},"28.0000° N, 45.0000° W (TIDAL ARCHIVE)","ibraaz-publishing/read/28-0000-n-45-0000",[319],{"id":320,"path":321,"alt":12,"title":322,"width":323,"height":324,"mimeType":179},"16043","ocean-baulcombe-toppin-28-0000-n-45-0000-w-tidal-archive-2025/Thumbnail.jpg","Thumbnail",1267,1533,[326],{"title":159,"slug":160},[],[],[330],{"authorName":331},"Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin",{"typeHandle":292,"entries":333},[334],{"title":335,"uri":336,"image":337,"readCategories":342,"writeCategories":344,"missionCategories":345,"authorInfo":346},"A Wider Lens on Information Operations","ibraaz-publishing/read/a-wider-lens-on-information-operations",[338],{"id":339,"path":340,"alt":12,"title":341,"width":178,"height":177,"mimeType":179},"16061","a-wider-lens-on-information-operations/IMG_6045.jpg","IMG 6045",[343],{"title":306,"slug":307},[],[],[347],{"authorName":348},"Jack Poulson",{"globalSet":350},{"id":351,"handle":352,"activated":353,"heading":354,"richText":355,"text":357},"16767","notification",false,"Visitor Information",{"html":356},"\u003Cp>Please note that our Majlis is currently closed and will reopen with our next exhibition in early July. The rest of the building is open so please do visit!\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr /> \u003C/p>","Got it",{"categories":359},[360,365,369,373,377,381,385,389],{"id":361,"slug":362,"title":363,"groupHandle":364},"4488","exhibitions","Exhibition","events",{"id":366,"slug":367,"title":368,"groupHandle":364},"4490","talks","Talk",{"id":370,"slug":371,"title":372,"groupHandle":364},"15579","music","Music",{"id":374,"slug":375,"title":376,"groupHandle":364},"4489","performance","Performance",{"id":378,"slug":379,"title":380,"groupHandle":364},"4492","film","Film",{"id":382,"slug":383,"title":384,"groupHandle":364},"6390","library-in-residence","Library-in-Residence",{"id":386,"slug":387,"title":388,"groupHandle":364},"18154","special-projects","Special Project",{"id":390,"slug":391,"title":392,"groupHandle":364},"18170","workshops","Workshop"]