VELYCHKO GALLERY presented a special project for Limassol Art Walks

Artists: Michalis Papamichael (Cyprus) & Olga Stein (Ukraine)

In November 2025 under the support of art patrons Serge Polivar and Olga Smulyanskaya VELYCHKO GALLERY successfully presented “Homes That Never Land”, a dialogue exhibition created for Limassol Art Walks 2025, which explored the idea of home as a space in continual motion. Through fragments of memory, material, and architecture, the project reflected on displacement, belonging, and the fragile tension between permanence and impermanence.

For this exhibition, the gallery constructed an entirely new interior environment within its Limassol space — bringing in light, repairing surfaces, and installing every element from scratch.
The exhibition opened with the work of Cypriot artist Michalis Papamichael, whose practice is grounded in the material and architectural language of Cyprus. His pieces were an exact depiction of furniture from his childhood home, recreated from eucalyptus paper and native Cypriot pigments. Through this reconstruction, Papamichael explored how materials, pigments, and architectural forms carry identity — moving between intimacy and distance, resonance and rupture. His works provided an anchored point within the exhibition, reflecting a home deeply tied to place and landscape.

Opposite this local grounding stood “Reassembled Light of Colonialism”, a monumental installation by Ukrainian artist Olga Stein, created specifically for the gallery’s six-meter-ceiling space. The installation unfolded as a delicate reconstruction—an attempt to rebuild familiar everyday objects that once held memory but could never be fully restored. What remained was a poetic, elusive echo: forms of domesticity dissolving into light, absence, and emotional afterimage.
Stein continued her exploration of how spaces are serviced, inhabited, and emotionally charged. Her practice addressed the subjectivity of home and the impossibility of carrying it intact across borders.
Like Papamichael, she brought into the gallery structures that were meaningful to her in Ukraine, opening a conversation about culture moving through culture, the shifting realities of emigration, and the reproduction of colonial legacies and enlightenment narratives.
Together, the practices of artists created a layered conversation about what is inherited, what is carried, and what can never fully land.

The project was supported by Serge Polivar and G Bar Limassol.