Displace / Miriam Paeslack

In Displace photographer Johanna Diehl, who studied in Leipzig, looks at the architectural traces left by an ongoing conflict on the island of Cyprus, which has been partitioned for some 35 years now. In her meticulous colour photographs the artist develops a typology of a sacral architecture that has undergone dramatic change as a result of standing empty, conversion and destruction over many years of conflict.

The title Displace plays on the dual meaning of dislodge and replace; it refers to the absence of people that is characteristic of the photographs, people forced to leave their homeland and their places of worship behind, mosques in the Muslim north and Christian-Orthodox churches in the south. The word also designates the process of rededication and rewriting by a different ethnic group that resettled the abandoned villages.