Finding New Frequencies: CHANNELLED At Cyprus’ XeniArtSpace Gallery

A woman becomes a sphinx. Bodies are exposed, unraveled, and transformed. Beetles glint like jewels against bare skin. Welcome to CHANNELLED, where the female imagination is permitted to wander.

Seventeen women artists, spanning generations and corners of the world, come together in Space 2 at XeniArtSpace in Limassol, Cyprus. Featuring painting, photography, textile, sculpture and installation, the exhibition is drawn from the private collection of founder and lead curator Xenia Kulbachevskaya.

Left: Leonor Fini’s Sphinge

The pieces were collected at different times and for different reasons. Only later, Xenia says, did she realise ‘these very different works were speaking to one another — visually and emotionally.’ Some turn inward, drawing on memory and personal experience; others reach for mythology, nature or something harder to name. At first glance, they have little in common. That is part of the fun.

What threads them together is the idea of channeling: making emotion, instinct, and experience visible. Rather than one neat conversation, CHANNELLED: Women in Art Across Centuries feels like tuning into 17 different frequencies and discovering where they unexpectedly overlap.

Welcome to CHANNELLED, where the female imagination is permitted to wander.

Transformation takes a more seductive turn in Leonor Fini’s Sphinge (1969). Fini moved in Surrealist circles but resisted being confined by them, often painting women as powerful, mysterious beings. Here, she makes herself one. She doesn’t just paint the mythical sphinx; she becomes her. And this sphinx is hardly waiting around to be conquered.

Part woman, part creature and entirely self-possessed, she seems to know something we don’t, with no intention of giving it away. Fini turns an ancient figure of riddles and danger into something distinctly modern: a woman who is powerful, sexual and, crucially, in control of how she is seen. 

While Fini transforms herself through mythology, Tracey Emin strips everything back. In Naked Photos – Life Model Goes Mad I, II, III, she is quite literally exposed. For several weeks, Emin worked naked inside a gallery as visitors watched from outside, taking on the roles of artist, model, and muse. The performance came at a turning point. After a period of personal and creative crisis, Emin was trying to find her way back to painting, and putting herself on display became part of that process. The photographs capture a bare body, but vulnerability is only half the story. A clever reversal appears here, too.

Instead of the familiar female nude created through someone else’s gaze, Emin is both the body being watched and the artist deciding how it will be seen. For a show about turning the inner world outward, it is hard to imagine a more literal example.

Right: Konstantina Krikzoni’s Unraveled I

CHANNELLED: Women in Art Across Centuries feels like tuning into 17 different frequencies and discovering where they unexpectedly overlap.

If Emin puts the body on display, Konstantina Krikzoni almost pulls it apart. In Unraveled I (2024), a female figure emerges from a mess of charcoal and ink, only to seem to disappear again. Her face suddenly comes into focus while limbs and lines blur together, making it difficult to tell where the body begins and ends.

Krikzoni often draws on figures from Greek mythology, including nymphs and sirens, to explore modern ideas of desire, vulnerability, and female strength. Here, though, nothing feels fixed. The title Unraveled says it best. The woman seems to be coming apart and taking shape at the same time, caught somewhere between a physical body and an emotional state.

Georg Wilson’s Bejeweled (2025) takes things somewhere stranger. At first, the curled green figure seems covered in jewels. Look closer, and those jewels have legs. Metallic beetles crawl across her skin as plants sprout around her, making the whole scene beautiful and just a little unsettling. Wilson’s imagined worlds draw on English folklore and landscape paintings, but humans are never quite in charge.

In Bejeweled, the body almost becomes a landscape itself, tangled up with the insects and vegetation around it. Even the beetles point to nature’s cycle of growth and decay. The result is a rather humbling reminder: nature does not belong to us. We belong to it.

Tracey Emin’s Naked Photos – Life Model Goes Mad I, II, III

Go for the names you recognise, perhaps, but leave time for the ones you don’t.Four works barely scratch the surface of CHANNELLED.

Elsewhere, Leiko Ikemura creates strange beings caught between human and animal, Lynne Drexler translates the rhythm of classical music into bursts of colour, and Jess Allen makes something as ordinary as a shadow feel deeply personal.

Around the next corner, the mood shifts again. No single idea defines what women’s art should look or feel like. Instead, these 17 artists find wildly different ways of making their inner worlds visible. Myth sits beside memory, vulnerability beside power, and the human body slips between nature, fantasy and the self.

Bringing such different voices together in Cyprus could easily have felt forced, but their contrasts become part of the experience. Go for the names you recognise, perhaps, but leave time for the ones you don’t. You have until 1st of March 2027 to find them. There are 17 frequencies here, and the pleasure is in discovering which ones stay with you.

VISITING INFO:

GALLERY NAME: XeniArtSpace

ADDRESS: Trilogy West Tower 335, 28th October Ave, 3106, Limassol, Cyprus

DATES: 18 Sep 2026 - 1 March 2027

Photographs by Alina Sparrow