"Relics of a Woman" by Maria Gvardeitseva at Parallel Programme of Vima Art Fair

Relics of a Woman examines the body as a site where lived experience becomes inscribed and where the sacred emerges not through idealisation, but through contact — through pain, intimacy, rupture, desire, care, and transformation.
Working across wax, porcelain, installation, and video, Maria Gvardeitseva develops a sensorial visual language in which materials melt, dissolve, preserve traces, and retain the imprint of embodied experience. Rather than representing the body directly, the works appear as residues, afterimages, and emotional artefacts.

Drawing from Mediterranean devotional traditions, wax votive figures are reinterpreted as contemporary relics: fragile, anonymous forms charged with memory and affect. The exhibition further references broader religious and art historical practices of preserving bodily fragments — hair, saints' relics, bones, teeth, umbilical cords, garments, and other intimate remains — as vessels of mourning, devotion, continuity, and symbolic presence. Detached from the body yet retaining its imprint, such fragments become carriers of emotional and cultural meaning.

The exhibition is organised by SYNCLERY Art Gallery, a conceptual contemporary art and design platform based in Cyprus, operating as both a residential gallery space and a nomadic curatorial practice through pop-up projects in alternative contexts. The project is presented as part of the parallel programme of VIMA Art Fair.