Marina Xenofontos is a Cypriot sculptor and multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans found objects, kinetic sculpture, film, writing and digital forms. Born in Limassol in 1988, she lives and works between Athens and Limassol. Her work examines how ideology and knowledge become embedded in domestic objects, civic spaces and personal archives. She often modifies vernacular materials or reconstructs architectural details, using mechanical repetition, replicas and deliberate malfunctions to explore the gaps between official histories and individual memory. Xenofontos describes this evolving body of references as an “unconditional archive”, in which objects and stories acquire new status through artistic transformation.
In 2026, Xenofontos represents the Republic of Cyprus at the Venice Biennale with It rests to the bones, on view from 9 May to 22 November. The exhibition combines an animatronic sparrow, rotating copper cylinders, family recordings of Cypriot folk songs and a replica of the ceiling of the Perroquet nightclub in Varosha, sealed since 1974. Earlier in the year, the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne presented Play Life, centred on the definitive version of her interactive video game Twice Upon a While. Together, these projects connect mechanical movement, cultural memory and Cyprus’s histories of rupture without reducing them to a single narrative.