VIMA Art Fair: Connecting New Art Geographies

The Mediterranean is more than just a coastline or a spot on the map. It’s a place shaped by myth and history, where cultures meet and overlap, and where politics, religion, and memory are tightly woven together. It is here, in Cyprus, that VIMA—the first international contemporary art fair on the island—was launched. More than just a marketplace, its concept centers on cultural dialogue, infused with social and political meaning.

The fair brought together 27 galleries and over 100 artists from more than 20 countries. The name itself, VIMA, or “Βήμα” in Greek, means both “step” and “platform,” reflecting its mission to provide a stage for diverse voices. Co-founded by Edgar Gadzhiev, Lara Kotreleva, and Nadezhda Zinovskaya, VIMA enters into a dialogue with the city, engaging with tourists, migrants, and local communities. Its venue, The Warehouse, a repurposed industrial site, retains its logistical and architectural roughness, but this unfinished character feels like a context for co-creation.

The 2025 curatorial project, titled The Posterity of the Sun, conveyed the fair’s key artistic statement. Curated by Paris-based Ludovic Delalande, the project transformed the ruins of the former SODAP wine factory of Limassol into a site-specific open-air museum. It brought together 17 artists and one writer from the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa, who explored the symbolic, emotional, and ecological power of the sun as both a universal life force and a destructive energy.

The show featured a post-apocalyptic garden where sunlight no longer symbolized celebration, but transformation. It scorches, marks, burns, and records. Delalande offered a geopolitical chronicle where each object stood as a trace or residue. Memory here slips away but never disappears. This is an exhibition conceived as a montage, a spatial essay where objects drift through architecture, light, and dust. The curator chose not to make the show feel grand or imposing, instead creating a sense of shared authorship between the artist, the space, the moment, and the viewer.

Many galleries moved away from a traditional display-case look, choosing instead to explore space and the idea of what’s left behind. The most striking booths were those that broke formal rules, focusing on the body, materials, and cultural memory. We selected five galleries that stood out for their curatorial approaches and connection with the fair’s main themes.

Open Gallery

Art Seen by Maria Stathi (Nicosia) explored how local issues connect with the global context.The booth was a live installation, with each piece reacting to the viewer’s presence. Four artists—Marina Genadieva, Vicky Pericleous, Amy Stephens, and Vassia Adamou Vanezi—captured a mood of slow-burning conflict and inner unrest.

Kalfayan Galleries (Athens – Thessaloniki), a pioneer in the expansion of the contemporary art scene in Greece and abroad, since 1995, has presented some of the most important post-war Greek artists: Antonis Donef, Farida El Gazzar, Maria Loizidou, Harm Gerdes, Angelos Merges, Edward Sacaillan, Panos Tsagaris, and Antrea Tzourovtis.

Alpha C.K. Art Gallery (Nikosia) showcases leading contemporary Greek and Cypriot artists. At the fair, their booth felt less like a typical exhibition and more like a quiet space for reflection. Costas Varotsos’s minimalist glass sculptures explored themes of wounds and horizons, while Thanasis Lalas used graphic art to map out personal myths and blurred borders.

pop/off/art (Moscow – Baku) represents international artists with a focus on post-Soviet space authors. Gallerist Sergey Popov brought a raw energy often missing from polished art fairs with works by Andrey Krasulin, Despina Flessa, and Shamil Shaaev. The booth focused on the body in crisis, the stressed mind, and materials pushed to their limits.

Nika Project Space (Dubai–Paris), founded by Veronika Berezina in 2023, stood out for its focus on the body, memory, and traces left behind. The gallery highlights stories from underrepresented regions and personal experiences expressed through materials. For VIMA’s first edition, it featured a striking watercolor series of women by Katya Muromtseva, along with works by Mirna Bamieh, Nika Neelova, and Adrian Pepe.