Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre,  
Associated with the Pierides Foundation (NiMAC)

20 September – 09 November 2024
Opening: Friday 20 September, 19:00 

Goethe-Institut Cyprus, Institut Français de Chypre, Queer Wave and NiMAC present “nono, bad timing!”, a process-based exhibition focusing on archiving queer times and spaces. The project brings together materials from the Marseille archive of “Mémoire des Sexualités” and the “Schwules Museum” in Berlin. From the month of October, “nono, bad timing!” will evolve into a laboratory for new proposals by Cyprus-based cultural practitioners. A touring exhibition titled “Queer As German Folk” will also be presented in its entirety at the Goethe-Institut in Nicosia, within the scope of this same project.

“nono, bad timing!”  starts with the recognition that temporal, spatial, and sexual dissonance towards the ‘universality’ of existence are intertwined. With a non-linear approach, the project aims to destabilise well-rehearsed rhythms and discourses to suggest new possibilities for what archiving might mean in this context: how can silenced histories be written and what/who can these processes empower? 

The “Mémoire des Sexualités” association has gathered a great number of documents pertaining to narrating the story of homosexuality in French and international social life, tracing its history from 1978 (the founding of the Groupe de Libération Homosexuelle de Marseille) to 2015. The images included in the exhibition focus on the activities of the Summer Universities of Homosexualities in 1979.

The material from “Queer as German Folk” highlights spaces of empowerment networks. This project takes the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots as an opportunity to offer insight into the history of queer movements in the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and reunited Germany since the 1960s. Particular emphasis is placed on the manifold relations with US movements.

Adopting the role of resident archivists, Cyprus-based cultural practitioners explore: the necessities and joys of a library/reading space (Loizos Olympios); the use of photography as a tool for exploring identity and constructing narratives (Logan Bellew); collecting stories and bringing personal archives in public space (Diomedes Koufteros); institutional critique and creating archives of feelings (Gabriel Koureas); dramaturgy and performance (Evita Ioannou).        

The title of the project is a humorous provocation to the power dynamics in play when queering chrononormativity, a concept devised by theorist Elisabeth Freeman that encompasses the expectation that we all follow the same timeline, geared towards predetermined productivity goals, and that there is the same right thing at the right time for everybody. 

This expectation is not only subjectively felt, as no one feels that they manage time exactly right, but it includes presentisms, echoes and aftermaths of wide-ranging sets of strategies, discourses and political actions that aim to choreograph bodies into rhythms and schedules that serve clear-cut (re)productive agendas – be they capitalist, nationalist, familial. In queer politics of memory and becoming, there is no such thing as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ timing, but irreducible -and thus timely- efforts to release the body from binds that are restricting and limiting.

“nono, bad timing!” will be inaugurated on the opening night of this year’s Queer Wave: the Cyprus LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. The festival’s 5th edition will run 20-29 September 2024 and is organised in partnership with NiMAC.