THE SEEKERS

“The Seekers” exists within a narrative around the quest for another place; it interrogates the human urge to escape urban alienation through the metaphor of flight. This body of work constructs a fragile heterotopia, a temporary ‘other’ space, where liminal figures mimic avian rituals, striving to defy gravity and societal constraints.

Rooted in Aristophanes’ ancient Greek play The Birds (414 BCE), where disillusioned Athenians transform into birds to build a utopian city in the clouds, the work mirrors contemporary crises of migration, displacement, and the precarious dream of belonging. I am drawn to the play’s allegorical power and theatrical absurdity, using its lens to interrogate urban trauma. Here, this idea that we are trying to escape and to take off, this challenge of gravity, becomes a dual metaphor: both physical weight and the inertia of societal structures.

The tension materializes through media: textiles stained with labor and memory, while improvised ‘wings’ become tragicomic symbols of resistance. The project exists at the intersection of myth and urban reality, where failure to fly is as critical as the attempt.

“Ioannou’s birdmen embody the collective delirium of our era” — Myrto Kakara