LUMA Westbau presents Entertainment, an exhibition of newly commissioned works by Christodoulos Panayiotou, extending a line of inquiry developed through One Year, his recent exhibition at LUMA Arles.

Across his practice, Panayiotou examines how experience is constructed, staged, represented and remembered, and considers the ways these processes shape meaning. In Entertainment, Panayiotou turns to leisure, retreat, minor spectacles and staged diversions, exploring their relationship to desire, memory and the organisation of time.
The exhibition considers entertainment both as an escape from everyday life and as a space where social roles, collective fantasies and ideas of emancipation are played out and rehearsed.

In these moments of diversion, the boundaries between work and leisure, authenticity and performance, withdrawal and participation become unstable, revealing how deeply these categories are embedded in contemporary life.

Following One Year, which reflected on duration, recurrence and the passage of time, Entertainment shifts the focus to the ways time is occupied, suspended and transformed.
Panayiotou approaches the exhibition as a form of dramaturgy, bringing personal memory and historical consciousness into contact with the present while resisting nostalgia. What emerges is a meditation on what our moments reveal about the worlds we inhabit and from which we seek to depart.

Curated by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Artistic Director, Luma Arles.

[Text: Luma Westbau]