The Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art was inaugurated in October 2005 and has so far presented over 20 exhibitions by some of the world's leading visual artists. The mission of the Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art is to provide a contemporary art space where visiting international artists can interact with the local community and simultaneously create links with international audiences. The PCC
A also encourages the interaction of established international artists and curators with local artists, and in collaboration with other centres of contemporary art around the world, it envisions to develop a unique artistic platform that will evolve and in turn bring about a new artistic dialogue within the broader European art context. Each year the PCCA presents international artists working in a variety of contemporary art forms and media – painting, installations, performance, video art, photography – as well as lectures and discussions. Exhibition catalogues on the hosted artists, as well as other monographs and books on contemporary art and photography are published by Pharos Publishers. Throughout the years, the PCCA has also developed a permanent collection of its own. The Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art is part of the Visual Arts Programme of the Pharos Arts Foundation, a non-profit cultural and educational foundation, and is therefore directly dependent on sponsorship and donations for maintaining and developing its activities. You can find out more about the different ways in which you can support the Pharos Arts Foundation and the Pharos Centre from the Pharos Arts Foundation website www.pharosartsfoundation.org
Residency Programme:
Through the Pharos Arts Foundation’s Residency Programme, visual artists, composers, musicians, writers and are invited to visit Cyprus, create new works and interact with local creators and audience. Examples of past residencies include British composer Emily Hall who visited Cyprus in 2005, to complete her opera Sante, based on the Rwandan genocide, before receiving its world premiere at the Aldborough Festival in the UK, in 2006; composer Evis Sammoutis who completed his masterpiece Echopraxia, which was premiered in Nicosia by Ensemble Modern in 2006 and went on to win several prizes including the Royal Philharmonic Society Award in London and the Irino Prize in Tokyo; Russian writer and environmentalist, Ivetta Gerasimchuk, who gave a talk about her award winning essay Dictionary of Winds and wrote a short piece, The Blue Line, inspired by the divided old Nicosia and dedicated to the Pharos Arts Foundation; poet and writer Joachim Sartorius; visual artists Richard Wentworth, Mike Marshall, Joanna Jones, Laura Padgett, Marcos Grigoryan, to name but a few.
