"But the windows aren’t there to be found or I am unable to find them."
The Windows
C.P. Cavafy

This phrase was stuck in my mind as I was working on the video, especially the second part of it: or I am unable to find them. The declaration of weakness or inability for resolution determines the mood of this work with its multiple transitions. Cavafy has used everyday words to set the atmosphere. His poem has set the atmosphere of the dark room in the video.
P.K

...In a life-size drawing installed in two panels by the artist Pelagia Kyriazi, one may discover an interesting paradox. On the surface of the larger panel, a male nude is seen from the dorsal view confronted the stone steps before him. The visual rhythm of the steps – inspired by the famous Pergamon Altar, transported from Asia Minor to Berlin more than a century ago – holds a nearly hallucinogenic effect. Within this unusual architectural context, Kyriazi’s male figure appears in a state of noble trepidation. His desire is to climb upward, and thus, to regain a sense of himself.

As a complement to the drawing, Kyriazi made a video-projection, entitled “Tyranny of Light” – a montage filled with overlays of images taken from the drawing, combined with other images and digital brushstrokes. By manipulating the stone steps through digital time, and by contrasting them with a view of Venetian blinds, a strange visual metaphor begins to emerge. Suddenly the hard obdurate stones – fraught with historical memory and conflict - are transformed into a source of light...

Robert C. Morgan

... Taking hundreds of photos of the image she has created and making a sequence out of selected images of this one pose, she destabilizes the singularity of the posture as she sets her figure in motion in a kind of animation, breathing life into him through repetition, an unfolding in time and space. The digital video she has made from these photographs, a compilation of changing states and racing thoughts, is spliced together with images of train tracks, windows, and corners of rooms...

Lilly Wei
Behold the Man

... Kyriazi is also planning to make a frieze of the stills from the video, a kind of deconstruction of the video or an extension of it so that the image is recontextualized once again in a continuous loop.
The frieze, in some sense, would articulate time, where each second, as a frame, is held and made visible. (George Duhamel, a French writer in the early days of cinema, said that what he disliked about film was that the images never stayed still.)..

Lilly Wei
Behold the Man

It is contemporary theatre, a synthesis of new technology and old media, of the provisionality of the temporal and what might underlie it, updating the poetics of nostalgia...

Lilly Wei
Behold the Man

These dramatic concepts manifest themselves in Kyriazi’s video as appearing/fading figure, sexually ambiguous characteristics both in the figural elements and voice, but most importantly in the mysterious shadows that alternate with brilliant light. The video’s ‘terribilitas’ elements are intensified by the eerie sounds of the musical score of Stockhausen’s Licht, which concludes in a series of helicopter sounds - possibly signaling the entrance of reality...

Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos
Manifest Presences: Mediators of Light