The exhibition Playground marks the first solo presentation of Meletios Meletiou’s work in Cyprus, hosted at eins gallery.

Playground activates the sense of exploration and play in an adventurous manner. It blurs the line between danger and enjoyment with aggressive surfaces that contort and reverse their initial impressions. The artist presents compositions that take up the space’s surfaces, appearing to evolve, spread, form units, and engage autonomously in a game of balance. He places emphasis on organisation over individual objects, shifting the focus from the properties of individual parts and treating the organisation of the whole as a dynamic process of interaction among the constituent elements. The work includes the viewer as an active participant in this relationship.

Systems, grids, and unpredictable patterns resembling cell-like connections that reflect the possibilities of action and reaction create an additional layer on the walls, the floor, and the structural support points. These elements are drawn in two seemingly opposing directions, oscillating between sensory danger and care. The artist uses this ambiguity to form unexpected conceptual connections. Meletiou continues his exploration of forms related to hostile architecture, a tool of urban design that discourages specific population groups from using public spaces.

He also focuses on the materiality of counterterrorism measures related to the global political context. Metal bars that partition public benches, obstacles controlling the movement of bodies, spikes, and pyramids projecting from the wall’s surface to prevent relaxation, standing, and sleeping—these serve as barriers that segregate contested groups but also function as mechanisms upholding urban pathology. Their architecture embodies fear and misunderstanding. Inevitably, his work is grounded and geographically shaped in response to urban stratification.

These forms within Playground become visible through the lens of a play area, revisiting childhood concepts that have been a recurring theme in the artist’s body of work. Following his solo presentation at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, Meletiou decisively expands his body of work, exploring the potential and setbacks of formal reclamation and the appropriation of hostile architecture. He underscores the significance of play and pleasure, even when these words seem inconceivable. The aggressive urban environment becomes visible in the exhibition with a playful disposition.

Meletiou introduces a series of interwoven questions about the relationship between leisure and work, play and profit production, and the playful threat posed by formal complexity. He examines the blend of danger and play, the paradoxical state of childhood as the

embodiment of the non-subject while simultaneously learning to create the “other.” Additionally, he delves into the fluidity that emanates from a child’s perspective as an active process or the potential to reshape established meanings in creating new ones.

Colour plays a significant role in his work, as does meticulous attention to the treatment of materiality —a play with textures that provokes the need for tactile exploration. The artist insists on using contrasting materials and reversing their expected characteristics, such as the sponge that becomes cemented or sharp surfaces that turn soft.

Meletiou emphasises the details that challenge our perceptual capacities. He grapples with the threshold, the theatricality made visible through its distortion, employing distancing for analysis while simultaneously invoking the impulse for engagement. He creates a perilous ‘playground’ within a rectangular space that imposes a circular path without corners. He transforms the intensely hostile elements into colourful works that alter their initial purpose: to negate a flat surface and create obstacles. Meletiou conveys the exuberance of a playground, framing it as both a heterotopia and a space of power negotiation. Ultimately, he explores the paradox of childhood, mimicry, reproduction, and the potential for resistance to established structures, readjustment, and the joy of disruption.

Curated by Panos Giannikopoulos