Venice Biennale

In a bright, expansive apartment situated next to a large park in Cologne, pictures of maps and postcards lay spread out on the floor.

"I feel really content here," says Marianna Christofides in a soft voice. "Cologne has such a lively art scene - it's really exciting for me."

But the young artist can find her way anywhere in the world, and takes the ideas for her projects from many places.

She shows two pictures on old glass transparencies that she found in an antique shop in England. In both, there's a street scene with a flower seller from the 1920s or 30s in Gibraltar. The vender is colorful, offering flowers to an English woman in a bright dress. It's one and the same image, but it bears two different titles: "Flower buyer" and "Flower seller."

Sensational career move

"When I saw this, I got curious," the Cologne-based artist explains. So she traveled to Gibraltar, visited archives there and began searching for the mysterious Garibaldi Pharmacy, whose lettering she thought she could make out in the picture.

"The pharmacy isn't there anymore, but it was once, and I stumbled across the story of the woman whose father owned it," says Christofides.

The artist documented the story of the well-to-do flower buyer and the poor flower seller for the exhibition in the Cyprian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which runs through November 2011.

Christofides applied to be included in the Pavilion after seeing an announcement from the Culture Ministry in Cyprus - and was accepted.

"In February, the ministry informed me that I'd actually been chosen," the artist says, a bit cautiously. Christofides has a reserved and humble manner.

Being selected is an extraordinary leap forward for the recent graduate, who will exhibit alongside the artist Elizabeth Hoak-Doering in the Cypriot Pavilion.

Migrant labor in art

Marianne Christofides was born to a German mother and a Cypriot father in Cyprus' capital, Nicosia. She first studied visual arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece before completing a degree in fine art media at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

In 2007, she came to Germany, where she also studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, rounding out her studies with a film titled "Dies solis. Sonntage in Nikosia" ("Dies solis. Sundays in Nicosia"). The film will also be shown at the Biennale.

The film deals with migrant laborers from Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam and the Philippines. They spend their single day off each week at markets and festivals in a location almost directly on the border. It's considered a UN buffer zone, separating the city and island into a Greek part to the north and a Turkish area to the south.

A divided city

"Many locals in Nicosia drive by quickly in their cars and don't even really look around ," says Christofides whose film was debuted just a few weeks ago in her hometown. "Most people were surprised that something like this even exists in Nicosia."

Many people are so busy that they don't even acknowledge the domestic workers, according to the artist. "These women disappear from the visible surface of society and are only seen on Sundays," she says.

The divided city of Nicosia plays an important role in Marianna Christofides artworks. She shows works of hers that were inspired by different blueprints for the city - some Greek, some Cypriot. On each of them, half of the city is represented with a blank space.

In her work, Christofides condemns efforts to make half the city's population invisible.

Street to nowhere

"When I lived in Cyprus, the division of the country was strangely taken for granted and I had a very nice childhood in the Greek part of the island," the artist recalls. "Later, I even had a studio on a street that led to nowhere because the border was and the end of it."

It wasn't until she had spent several years in Germany - far enough away from Cyprus to gain a new perspective - that she started to ponder the division of her home country.

Author: Katja Lückert / gsw / kjb

Editor: John Blau