STRAINING AGAINST THE FRAME

In the new body of work exhibited at CYPHER, Yorgos Papafigos constructs hybrid systems around conditions of confinement, protection and control. In his practice, CGI, 3D scanning and printing translate the digital into sculptural matter and embodied experience. The focus shifts from the body that is confined to the structures that make its confinement possible. Material moves between the organic and the artificial, the protective and the threatening. As mechanisms of production, care and surveillance intertwine, security and constraint cease to operate as opposing poles and share the same infrastructures. Wire fences and industrial materials that develop protrusions suggest that whatever organises or safeguards also carries the capacity to coerce. In Same Side (2025), two mirror-like bird-formed entities become visible only through what both binds and produces them: digitally scanned wire mesh rendered in photopolymer resin, with joined sections holding the form in a state of suspension. The figures strain against the very framework that generates them, though their escape is never fully realised. Filter (2025-26), a collaborative video work with Dimitris Batsis, acts as a temporal extension of the sculpture’s logic, unfolding as a process without beginning or resolution. In the Hosts series (2025), entrapment gives way to symbiosis. Mechanical components and imprints carry organic resin elements resembling parasites or cocoons at an indeterminate stage of development. Host and guest become mutually dependent to the point where the distinction no longer holds. What emerges remains a residue of a process still underway. In Untitled (2026), the form of the honeycomb, inherently organic and alive, is cast in resin, appearing frozen, impenetrable, inert. In a restrained, near-monochromatic palette, the two works on paper form nebulous atmospheric zones. Homogeneous pastel surfaces develop through traces, interruptions and abrasions in the pigment. Perforations evoke puncture and mark the limits of the surface as points of escape. The works operate as fields of tension in which absence functions as a medium. The exhibition space itself is structured as an environment of pressure and instability. Representation withdraws, narrative loses temporal continuity and information arrives fragmented and technologically mediated. Within this framework, ambiguity runs through the exhibition as an active and unresolved condition.