April 2, 2025

On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost? 

by Lamia Abukhadra

The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Over the past eighteen months, the genocide in Gaza has laid bare the state of world, showing us the true brutality of neoliberal values and institutions, and the unadulterated depravity of settler colonialism. While much of the world has persisted in a state of complicit blindness, a blindness that tolerates the erasure and ghostification of Gaza, students, artists, writers, filmmakers, cultural workers, have been on the front lines of speaking out against genocide and imagining new forms of resistance and solidarity.

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, invokes formal and conceptual notions of ghosts, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus, specifically the country’s historic and current geopolitical role in the Levant region and in the genocide on Gaza. The artworks in this exhibition show us how ghost can be properly attended to and examined in order to develop a new sensory mode and thus a new way of engaging with the world around us. It was my pleasure to interact with and review this complex exhibition as my own form of digital ghost.

— Lamia Abukhadra, Art and Communications Director

Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

—Lamia Abukhadra

On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost? The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

My notification doesn’t go off as planned; I log in to the Instagram live tour fifteen minutes late. By the time I am able to join, I have missed the explanation of the exterior of the space as well as much of the first room. No matter, a record of the tour is saved and uploaded later, acting as a trace of the last days of the exhibition. Apart from a detailed press kit and the virtual conversations I had with some of the artists, this is the only way I encountered On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

My initial meeting with some of the artists who collectively conceived, produced, and invigilated the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion—comprised of the Lower Levant Company (Peter Eramian and Emiddio Vasquez), Haig Aivazian, and the Endrosia Collective (Andreas Andronikou, Marina Ashioti, Niki Charalambous, Doris Mari Demetriadou, Irini Khenkin, Rafailia Tsiridou, and Alexandros Xenophontos)—took place on Zoom a few days before the exhibition was set to close. During our discussion, Andreas Andronikou mentioned that as the artists explored the varying intensities and materializations of the ghost in the machine, a key theme throughout the exhibition, the question “On which side of the screen lies the ghost?” was pivotal in conceiving the pavilion’s conceptual framework. Defined by the artists as the persistent, excessive presence of that which is repressed while paradoxically and simultaneously actively withdrawing, ghosts become the material in which speculative forms or methodologies can emerge. Within these alternative modes, that which has been repressed can be properly attended to and examined; a new sensory mode is developed. Through the process of “vigilance,” or the act of keeping vigil, the ghost in its many manifestations becomes a collaborator in sensing, imagining, and building new worlds from the one currently crumbling around us. 

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… invokes notions of ghosts, ghosting, and haunting through several formal and conceptual approaches, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus. The exhibition title is extracted from the opening lines of a 2019 Forbes article¹ which details a Cyprus-based spyware operation run by Israeli tech millionaire Tal Dilian and the Intellexa consortium. The article describes a wildflower-lined street in Larnaca where an unassuming black van is parked, inside of which exists an arsenal of technology capable of hacking into nearby smartphones with the purpose of gleaning and intercepting all of the private correspondences within. The Intellexa consortium as well as other companies associated with or owned by Dilian were found to be involved in several scandals, including the selling of spyware to the oppressive regime in Egypt and a paramilitary group in Sudan, mass unregulated internet surveillance in Nigeria, the surveillance of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, and, most recently, receiving US Treasury sanctions for “developing, operating, and distributing commercial spyware technology that presents a significant threat to the national security of the United States.”² In referencing the black van scandal, the artists critically engage with the larger positionality of the nation of Cyprus as a covert or complicit ghostly presence in relation to the Levant region both historically and recently; a thoroughfare in which European, American, and Levantine geopolitical interests and dynamics meet. A mere 45-minute plane ride from the Levantine coast, Cyprus has long been a site for British and American military surveillance posts. The Treaty of Establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, signed in 1960 to grant Cyprus its independence from British colonial rule, includes several clauses granting the British government the right to maintain sovereign military bases in Akrotiri and Dhekelia, both of which remain active. More recently, Cyprus’ proximity to the Levant manifested through Cypriot residents hearing the 2020 Beirut Port explosion;³ in June 2024, the now-deceased Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened the nation, saying that it would be considered “part of the war” if it allowed the Israeli military to use its air or maritime spaces;⁴ and in January 2025, a report from the British Palestinian Committee laid out the extent of British military involvement in the genocidal war on Gaza, specifically mentioning the use of British RAF bases on the island of Cyprus for cargo transport to Israel and nightly surveillance flights over Gaza.⁵ Digging into the fantastical anecdote of the black van and the geopolitical associations it invokes, the artists collectively decided to create a framework for the entire exhibition to be the site of a speculative agency, Forever Informed. The aims of this agency, whose slogan is “smart solutions to weak signals” are left intentionally vague, but we are told that they gather information. The framing of the entire exhibition space as a parafictional surveillance company in disarray, in between setting up (appearance) and abandonment (disappearance), creates a space ripe for haunting. Each individual artwork is a complex examination of Cyprus’ geopolitical position that doubles as an exploration of this mysterious organization’s mythologies and imaginaries. The space itself existed as a satellite exhibition outside of the Biennale’s Giardini, an unassuming yet proximate presence haunting the main space of the 2024 Biennale. Rather than hiring the traditional gallery watchers to monitor and police the space, the artists themselves as well as invited residents took part in the practice of invigilation, drawing from the British use of the word invigilator: Those who look after a space. The practice of invigilation meant that the artists themselves stayed with their works and welcomed people into the space. Residents who took part in the Vigil Workspace were invited to perform and create discourse in relation to the exhibition as they sat vigil. Key to the practice of invigilation was the tours that the artists regularly gave of the space, thoroughly explaining the conceptual framework of the exhibition and the significance of each artwork in their own ways. 

Below is an abbreviated description of my experience attending a virtual walkthrough of the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion, partially embellished with additional information available in the pavilion’s press kit. 

**** 

I am sitting on one side of the screen, about to watch the tour of On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… on Instagram Live, facilitated by the Lower Levant Company. 

The phone camera is fixed on a view of an LED screen mounted vertically, like a phone screen, inside the facade of the Cyprus Pavilion. For a few minutes, we watch as the video looping on the LED monitor appears to glitch, fragmenting clips from a 2019 Forbes documentary which contains footage granted by the spyware dealer Tal Dilian of his black van conducting surveillance on a wildflower-lined street. The ambient noise of footsteps—assumed to belong to exhibition viewers drawn in by the screen’s alluring advertisement-like brightness—continue around the camera holder. In the darkness of early evening, the LED screen emanates light so strongly that it is the only thing the camera is able to capture, the surrounding environment is too dark and thus underexposed. 

The camera-holder, Peter Eramian, a member of the artist duo Lower Levant Company, backs up and Emiddio Vazquez, the other LLC member, appears in-frame and welcomes us to “the last ever tour” of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

In addition to LED Screen (by Forever Informed), Vazquez points us to the other piece of the pavilion installed along the canal, Organ (by Rafailia Tsiridou and Emiddio Vasquez), a network of bright orange pipes which could be mistaken as part of the building’s infrastructure. As they come into contact with the vibrations created by the canal and its surrounding environment, the six PVC pipes create a feedback network of amplification and transmission. Organ is an eavesdropper or a spy, turning the sounds of the canal and the conditions of its surroundings into harvestable information. Rather than record or analyze data points, Organ simply transmits the vibrations that it encounters, feeding them into other pieces inside the space as live, unreproducible material, calling into question the purpose of the fabulated company Forever Informed. I recall the common cliché of when horror film characters first begin to suspect that a place is haunted, reassuring themselves that the strange noise they heard was “just the wind.” In this case, the wind and other natural or man-made elements create a haunting, gathering environmental elements to create an excessive force in which the tensions between information gathering and art are brought together. Yet, Organ does not gather, store, or organize any information, instead leaving us with purely sonic experiences available to us only in the present. On camera, the tour guides tell us that this particular artwork received a lot of attention and curiosity while it was being installed. 

We are led inside and after explaining the conceptual premise of the exhibition, Vazquez turns our attention to the first room which he describes as the “reception room” for Forever Informed. Among the pieces we are shown in this room, all of which engage with histories and materialities of information gathering and transmission, are Tyre Track by Lower Levant Company and Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian. Sitting on the middle of the cement reception room floor is Tyre Track, a low rectangular mound of concrete with stones, gravel, seashells, and other detritus embedded within it. The indentation of a car tire track has been left diagonally across the rectangle. We learn that this trace was made by Forever Informed’s own surveillance van which has eerily similar capabilities as Tal Dilian’s infamous black van. The mesh peeking out from the edges of the object gives us the impression that this mound was not extracted from another location but cast. Upon closer inspection, the tracks appear to be a negative imprint, suggesting that the object itself may be a false or implanted trace of this covert operation. While holding the camera, Eramian adds that the dubious and archeological qualities of the piece leads one to question what other traces have been left on the island of Cyprus, especially those of a ghostly or clandestine nature. 

Nearby, hanging on a wall is Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian, a Lebanese artist invited to contribute to the Cyprus Pavilion. Eramian tells us that recently Aivazian has been working on the dualities of light and darkness; light always associated with truth and enlightenment, as well as the Promethean myth where light and thus knowledge was passed on to humans, and darkness associated with criminality and unproductiveness. For Aivazian, we are told, this duality is not as clear as we may think, as the rise of modernity and neoliberal capitalism has meant that the materialities of light have been used or involved in the extraction of resources, policing and control of movement, and surveillance, while darkness could serve as a generative, fugitive space outside the watchful gaze of power. In this diptych of etched copper plates, Aivazian works with found etchings of torch bearers, which one could assume originate from representations of revolution or freedom, but are actually sourced from images of colonial expedition. As the camera approaches the etchings, Vazquez and Eramian as well as some of the other artworks in the space are reflected back. While the plate on the right consists of a small, isolated etching of a hand holding a torch surrounded by negative space, we are told that the plate on the left is a closeup of the texture of smoke from that a lit torch emits. In engaging with the analogue printing process, Aivazian invokes the mechanism of information and image circulation at the height of European colonization—where foreign lands, bodies, and ecologies were often imagined, represented, and reproduced through the medium of etching and lithography. But Aivazian edits this methodology of circulation, showing us only the matrix; the possibility of producing a large number of prints lingers as a ghostly suggestion. Copper itself, a resource in which Cyprus is rich, is an essential material in the contemporary battle over control, progress, and information, extracted for use in computing, electric conductivity, and signal transmission. The choice of cropping and zooming in creates an obfuscation. What could the texture of smoke hide? Are the torch-bearers leading the masses towards freedom or, as colonial entities, will they use their torches as a tool for mass destruction? 

As we move into the second room, we see AVRION PROIN EN NA DEIS, which translates to “TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL SEE,” a sculptural work by Alexandros Xenophontos, member of the Endrosia collective. Sixteen tiles—three of which emit fluorescent white light that never turns off and one of which is missing—constitute a drop ceiling in the center of the space. In lieu of the missing tile, a subsea cable, usually used to transmit telecommunication signals across large stretches of ocean, descends and begins to make its way across the floor. As the phone approaches the severed end of the cable, a low, ominous, and irregular droning can be heard. We are told it is the sound of the activity of and around the canal being transmitted from the outdoor sculpture, Organ. The cable is wrapped in several tight fitting leather corsets, contrasting with the corporate office aesthetic of the ceiling and referring to the fetishistic nature of information ownership and transmission. As the phone is pointed into the opening in the ceiling, we notice a light flashing or glitching rhythmically. Perhaps this is the same flickering light one would see in the event of a haunting, or perhaps it is an infrastructural malfunction. We learn that the light is flashing the message “tomorrow morning you will see” in morse code, inspired by the message of a found telegram sent from Cyprus to Alexandria in 1955. Informed by the geopolitical history of Cyprus as a thoroughfare for telecommunications in the Mediterranean as well as a neocolonial command point within the Levant, the sculpture creates a foreboding atmosphere. In transmitting this message to us, is Forever Informed promising us enlightenment, or are they communicating a threat? 

Just outside of the second room is an enclosed courtyard where the sound installation Crossover Frequency Spectrum by Lower Levant Company also transmits some of the vibrations from Organ. Other sounds broadcasted through the six mounted Iwata horns include local bat chirps, whistles and cracks from the ionosphere near military antennae, and field recordings taken near the UK airbase in Akrotiri, all of which constitute sounds that Vazquez says are “very loud” but usually go ignored as we are not attuned to them. Atop a bedding of black copper slag, the mouth-like horns—some functional and mounted on a truss emerging from the slag, and others ceramic replicas placed directly on the black substrate—amplify and draw viewers to attend to new frequencies, thus imploring us to develop a new sensory mode.

Unintelligible sounds leak out from the room just ahead, named SOUNDR* after a codename for a joint British/American surveillance station in Cyprus exposed as a key site for surveillance in the Middle East. Darker in tone and in lighting, this last room in On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… is populated by video installations by Lower Levant Company, Haig Aivazian, and some members of Endrosia and serves as a cross section of the relationship between Cyprus and Lebanon. Their sounds overlapping, the three animation-focused video works in SOUNDR* explore the ghostification of cities through gentrification and real estate speculation, haunting and ghost hunting through digital materialities, and the generative, insurgent possibilities that spaces of darkness, often inhabited by ghosts, can have. 

The tour closes with a brief explanation of the practice of invigilation which took place throughout the duration of the Biennale and the multilingual publication produced in tandem with the exhibition. 

Vazquez and Eramian thank us for watching, the live video ends. Like a ghost, I rewatch the tour a few more times, retracing its path, attempting to glean as much as I can from it. 

*** 

I am on one side of the screen. 

On the other side, the acceleration of ethnic cleansing of Palestine through the eighteen month-long live-streamed genocide in Gaza. I am on one side of the screen of my phone witnessing unimaginable atrocities. On the other side, Gaza is living it. My notification goes off on January 18, 2024 and Bisan Owda is wearing a press vest, live streaming through the night of the Israeli siege and bombardment at the Nasser Hospital. My notification goes off October 13, 2024 and Saleh Aljafrawi is unable to describe the scene as he films Shaban al-Dalou burning to death in a tent in the Al Aqsa hospital courtyard after Israel committed one of many “tent massacres.” For months, Anas Al Sharif is on camera giving us tour after tour of the ruins and conditions of life in the besieged Jabalia refugee camp, unrecognizable from its pre-war photos. On one side of the screen, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people through bombing, sniping, blockade of all food, water, and medical supplies, besieging and destroying all medical infrastructure as well as entire neighborhoods; Israel’s attempt to exterminate all life in Gaza, to make it withdraw. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly turned into martyrs, into ghosts. 

Often, as a civilian or a journalist would film an instance of forced displacement, the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a home, a car, or a group of tents, the influx of injuries or martyrs in a barely functioning hospital, someone looks into the camera and screams, “Who are you filming for?!” 

I am on the other side of the screen.

On my side of the screen, life goes on, and the genocide continues; we go to protests, we boycott, we occupy university property, we try to raise funds for mutual aid; concrete, political action is often stymied; international law is ignored. Every institution is complicit: From international human rights organizations and legal bodies, to western democracies and electoral politics, higher education, and to art institutions, we witnessed an expansion of fascism, an unwillingness to act justly in the face of extreme violence, an unwillingness to divest from systems of surveillance and arms manufacturing, an increase in policing of students, censorship of artists, and dismissal of professionals across all fields. Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

The ghost of the world has also exposed the hypocrisy of neoliberal institutions and their values. The 2024 Venice Biennale, unfortunately, was one of them, preferring to maintain its conventional format rather than acknowledge the genocide in Gaza in any meaningful way. It was artists and cultural workers, notably the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), who took the initiative to “haunt” the Biennale and center the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine. For much of the Biennale, the alliance staged several interventions and protests in order to disrupt business-as-usual while calling to exclude the Israeli Pavilion from participation. The group also co-hosted or brought attention to several satellite exhibitions and events featuring Palestinian art and literature.⁶ This form of haunting, which took place within the Biennale, around the city of Venice, and through various digital campaigns, aimed at recalibrating the sensory attunement of one of the largest global art institutions and events, and create an alternative experience for artists, attendees, and cultural workers in extraordinary times. 

While ANGA intervened in the Venice Biennale’s actual and ethical positionality, the artists in the Cyprus Pavilion engaged with the ghost of the world on a formal and conceptual level, critically immersing themselves in all aspects of “representing” a country actively yet covertly engaged in the genocide in Gaza and the surveillance of the surrounding region. While Gaza shows the world for what it is, the artists at the Cyprus Pavilion present us with formal and discursive interventions—ghosts—which allow us to engage with our surroundings and to imagine worlds anew.

1. Thomas Brewster, “A Multimillionaire Surveillance Dealer Steps out of the Shadows . . . and His $9 Million WhatsApp Hacking Van.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 March 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/08/05/a-multimillionaire-surveillance-dealer-steps-out-of-the-shadows-and-his-9-million-whatsapp-hacking-van/. ↩︎
2. David Kenner, “Notorious ‘predator’ Spyware Firm Intellexa Hit with New US Sanctions – ICIJ.” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 24 Sept. 2024, www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/notorious-predator-spyware-firm-intellexa-hit-with-new-us-sanctions/.  ↩︎
3. “Beirut Explosion: What We Know So Far.” BBC News, BBC, 11 Aug. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53668493. ↩︎
4. Paul Raymond, “Hezbollah’s Threat Caught Cyprus off Guard, What Are the Issues at Stake?” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 25 June 2024, aje.io/hrf0tx.  ↩︎
5. Oscar Rickett, “New Report Lays out Full Extent of UK-Israel Military Partnership in Gaza.” Middle East Eye, 28 Jan. 2025, www.middleeasteye.net/news/new-report-lays-out-full-extent-uk-israel-military-partnership-gaza. ↩︎
6.  A list of which can be found here: https://anga.live/venice.html ↩︎

Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist currently based in Beirut and Chicago.

Her practice studies how disasters can resurrect and generate new forms of perception, collectivity, and resistance, often using the Palestinian context as an urgent microcosm. Within her drawings, prints, sculptures, texts, and installations, she embeds speculative frameworks which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.

Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. She is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021–2022 Jan van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, Chicago, Beirut, and Berlin. Lamia is a 2018–2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE and the University of Michigan’s Daring Dances initiative, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Abukhadra is also a cultural worker and currently holds the position of Art and Communications Director at Mizna (St. Paul, MN).