How is artistic creation connected to power? When does identity shift from a means of self-definition into a mechanism of limitation? And what happens when trauma acquires artistic value through its aestheticisation?
These are among the questions that will be explored during the public discussion "Ethnolatria and Traumatolatria: Art, Gender, Cyprus and the Re(li)gion", which will take place on Tuesday, 17 November, from 6pm to 9pm, at Kartzin by Visual Voices in Nicosia.
The discussion will feature artist Natis and psychoanalyst and researcher Dr Avgi Saketopoulou, who will examine issues of identity, gender, trauma and collective consciousness through the intersection of psychoanalysis, politics and art.
At the centre of the discussion will be the ways in which social and cultural categories shape human subjectivity, as well as the conditions under which collective identification can develop into ethnocentrism.
The conversation will also explore when gender categories function as mechanisms of internalised control and how artistic representations of trauma are influenced by systems of recognition and reward within the art world.
The event takes place in Nicosia, a city the two speakers approach as an "impossible homeland", opening a dialogue about the contradictions of identity, memory and belonging.
The speakers
Natis is a conceptual painter working between Berlin and Nicosia.
His work examines collective and individual psychic landscapes, with particular emphasis on the formation of artistic identity through Western frameworks and social power structures.
His practice incorporates a range of artistic personas, including Hasan Aksaygın, Hank Yan Agassi and Hasso Weiß Ehrenwerth, as different starting points for exploring artistic subjectivity.
He is currently undertaking doctoral research titled Heteronymy in Contemporary Visual Art at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.
Dr Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst based in New York.
She teaches in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University and holds the Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Her research interests include trauma, aesthetic experience, queer and trans lives, race and migration.
She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia and co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity.
Her work has received professional distinctions, while one of her interviews forms part of the permanent collection of the Freud Museum Vienna.
She is also founder of the Cypriot and Greek branches of the Palestine Mental Health Network, serves on the Arts Council of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and is a founding member of P-HOLE.
The discussion will be conducted in English.
Information
"Ethnolatria and Traumatolatria: Art, Gender, Cyprus and the Re(li)gion"
- Date: Tuesday, 17 November 2026
- Time: 18:00-21:00
- Venue: Kartzin by Visual Voices, 83 Aeschylou Street, Nicosia
- Speakers: Natis and Dr Avgi Saketopoulou
- Language: English
