Karma
Barnes

Co-Lapses Grand Prix Winner Larnaca Biennale 2025

'Along Line and Traces' Larnaca, Cyprus 

Interdisciplinary artist Karma Barnes, representing Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, has been awarded the Grand Prix of the Larnaca Biennale 2025 for her large-scale installation CO-Lapses, presented at Apothiki 79, a historic limestone warehouse in the centre of Larnaca, Cyprus.

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The Larnaca Biennale, running from 15 October to 28 November 2025, is the largest and most recognised international art and culture event in Cyprus. Curated by Sana López Abellán under the theme Along Lines and Traces, this edition invited artists to consider how time, movement, and memory leave visible and invisible marks on people and places. Within this framework, the exhibition becomes “an opportunity for dialogue and the exchange of ideas, as a physical experience, or as the stillness of a memory.” The artists’ works collectively explore how lived experience materialises through matter and form, how water, limestone, and pigment trace the temporality of existence itself.

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“The jury unanimously recognised Karma Barnes as the Grand Prix winner of the Larnaca Biennale, noting her remarkable capacity to merge poetic sensitivity with conceptual and environmental depth. Her work stood out as an emblem of this year’s exhibition where time unfolds not as a linear progression, but as resonance, rhythm, and return.”

- Sana López Abellán, Curator, Larnaca Biennale 2025

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Barnes’s award-winning installation CO-Lapses is an upscaled interpretation of the miniature mud architectures built by wasps that inhabit her studio. Using 31 earth pigments and oxides locally sourced from Cyprus, she constructed suspended vessels that slowly release fine layers of limestone sand and.pigment. Over time, the work evolves as a living system, its flows and accumulations tracing cycles of erosion, renewal, and material memory.

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Grounded in biomimicry, CO-Lapses draws inspiration from the nest-building of mud wasps that gather wet soil, mix it with saliva, and form clustered cells. In Barnes’s hands, this process becomes a meditation on belonging, care, and co-creation. Influenced by biologist Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (2003), Barnes approaches natural systems not as symbols but as frameworks for sustainable design and adaptive thinking.

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The work emerged after observations of the mud wasps interactions with the materiality of her artworks produced following several significant natural disasters around her home region. The building of nests from Barnes art materials reflected both the agility and resilience creative practice engenders in a period of compounded environmental impermanence and lived experience of climate change.

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Working between Bundjalung Country (Australia) and Aotearoa New Zealand, Barnes’s practice engages material, psychological, and environmental systems of transformation. Her installations function as temporal ecologies, immersive environments that invite reflection on impermanence, resilience and interdependence.

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An earlier iteration of CO-Lapses was exhibited at the 18th Arte Laguna Prize Finalist Exhibition at the Arsenale Nord, Venice (2024), and a new iteration of the work will be presented at the Arte Laguna Prize 20th Edition in Shanghai (2025), running from November to December.

Through CO-Lapses and her wider practice, Barnes expands a dialogue between material systems and lived experience. The work reimagines the architecture of mud wasps through human scale and process, transforming natural strategies of shelter and protection into sculptural environments that unfold through time. In this site-specific iteration, the gradual fall of Cypriot pigments becomes both a material performance and a study of how cycles of care, decay, and renewal shape the spaces we inhabit. By translating ecological intelligence into form, Barnes proposes art as a living system — one that invites us to sense connection, agency, and adaptation within the shared matter of our world.

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“These lines become even more fascinating when they start reflecting connections between people: when the lines become an abstraction through which we communicate, but also a testament to our movement in history, a convergence or node.”

- Sana López Abellán, Larnaca Biennale Curator

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Visit: https://biennalelarnaca.com

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