The Acacia and the Elephant

wooden frame with two glass windows. in the larger frame window at the top a printed text while in a small window frame at the bottom a faded 5x4inch polaroid photograph of an elephant's anatomical drawing in a mysterious landscape
series of three images of a closeup of someones' hands reaching behind a bathroom wall fitting for what appears to be a human tooth
colour photograph of a fossilised incisor from a museum collection. Label reads: Incisor of Elephas Cypriotes, Bate Kerynia Hills, Cyprus
large photo grid poster reconstruction of wall mounted dwarf elephant's fossil remains. person's hands and bare feet protruding from top and bottom behind the poster. set on a gravel road with a cliffside background of eroded geological strata
photo of large fossilised bone with measuring scale on a black burnt dirty background
seated bearded man shot from a higher angle face obscured by his gatsby cap. he is holding a cigarette in his left hand and a computer mouse with the right seamingly looking at a screen which is out of view. On the table there are white sticker labels some of which have written notes, and hand rolled cigarette paraphernalia
poster of paleontological sea creatures fixed only at three corners with pins on a brown fabric lined noticeboard
image of an old b&w photo of 19 fossils layed out on a table. On either side of the photo there are white snake style lead weights
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CHARALAMBOS ARTEMIS AND ALEXANDRA MANGLIS
A private fossil collector dreamt of a prehistoric elephant skeleton buried under a single acacia tree in the south-east corner of Cyprus. The next day, he and his wife drove to the exact spot he had dreamt of and, digging under the roots of the acacia, they found the tusk of an as-yet undiscovered species of paleolithic pachyderm. Their discovery shed a new and unexpected light on a largely under-explored era of Cypriot history, prompting a flurry of scholarly activity that omitted the collector’s name from published articles about the finding.

Through a combination of photography and writing, Charalambos Artemis and Alexandra Manglis tell the fossil collector’s tale, seeking to document not only the protagonist and his discovery but also the sibylline dream itself. The resulting work presents a blurring of the dreamy and the real, where truth sits only a hair’s breadth away from the incredible and discredited. At the same time, The Acacia and the Elephant spans a period of 200,000 years, stretching past the timeline of human history all the while fixed to the present day. The yoking of this temporal chasm to the muddied line that divides the real from the unreal allows for the unearthing of a complicated, multidimensional story, one that seems to unravel further at each investigative turn.

Artemis and Manglis pursue their investigation by turning to specific moments, places, and objects that at first may seem incongruous but when gathered together create resonances and connections that seek to underscore questions of narrative reliability. Sometimes creating visceral, haptic imagery, sometimes marginal and ghostly, Artemis and Manglis use their differing mediums to jointly undercut notions of present and past, of real and unreal, of the documented and undocumented, and of legitimate and illegitimate platforms for historical discovery. In so doing, The Acacia and the Elephant provides an unusual perspective on Cyprus’ history, interacting with authenticity, contested narratives, the dubiety of institutional knowledge, and the ways in which the affect of subjects and objects shifts and changes within these altering contexts.​​​​​​​

black and white poster with fossil illustrations of dwarf elephant incisor, teeth and mandibles