In Displace, the artist Johanna Diehl, who studied photography in Leipzig, deals with the architectural traces of an ongoing conflict on the island of Cyprus, which has been divided for a good 35 years. In her extremely precise colour photographs, the artist develops a typology of sacred architecture that has undergone dramatic change through vacancy, transformation and destruction as a result of the long state of war.
The title Displace, which means both “to expel” and “to replace”, refers to the characteristic absence in the photographs of people who have had to leave their homes and places of worship – mosques in the Muslim north and Christian Orthodox churches in the south. At the same time, however, this term also describes the process of rededication and reinscription by another ethnic group that has resettled in the abandoned villages.

Johanna Diehl, *1977 in Hamburg, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.