A MAJOR EXHIBITION celebrating the work of Cypriot-Australian artist Peter Lyssiotis is currently on show at Monash University. Titled Silence is No Refuge, it is the first stand-alone presentation dedicated to his career, bringing together over forty years of artists’ books, photomontages and collaborations. On display at the Sir Louis Matheson Library at Monash’s Clayton campus, the exhibition offers an expansive view of how Lyssiotis has used modest, tactile mediums to explore memory, migration, cultural identity and political conscience.
Curated by Anne Holloway and Kerri Klumpp of Monash University Library’s Special Collections, with exhibition design by Megan Atkins Studio and curatorial advisement by Peter Lyssiotis himself, the show is careful not to simply chart a life’s work. Instead, it creates space where books — the primary vehicle of Lyssiotis’s art — can speak on their own terms. Each stands as a small, hand-held theatre where past and present, poetry and protest, collide.
Born Panagiotis John Lyssiotis in Cyprus in 1949, the artist migrated to Australia with his family in 1953. They settled in Melbourne’s East Burwood, a suburb then rapidly filling with Greek and Italian migrants. Greek was spoken at home, alongside stories from his grandmother and letters from his father that still carried the dust of Cyprus. This mingling of cultural memory with the daily task of becoming Australian shaped Lyssiotis’s early sense of self. It also laid the ground for much of his art, which has always looked backwards and outwards: to ancestral landscapes half-remembered, and to the forces shaping migrant lives.
In the 1970s Lyssiotis studied literature and worked as a teacher. But by the early 1980s, he was searching for a form that could hold more than straightforward analysis or narrative. The artists’ book proved to be exactly that. Unlike works meant for distant viewing, books demand touch. They must be turned, inspected, their meanings revealed slowly through sequence. Lyssiotis embraced this with a craftsman’s care — choosing papers that absorb ink in different ways, hand-stitching spines, layering photographs and type so they sometimes obscure, sometimes illuminate.
Across the next four decades, he produced a body of work remarkable for its breadth and restless intelligence. His books probe the ambiguity of language, the slippery terrain of belonging, and the large political forces that shape the smallest details of life. They also reveal a deep commitment to collaboration: with poets, printmakers, photographers and architects, each partnership producing a book that is a dialogue, not a solitary act.
Red and Blue
Lyssiotis has long described his work as falling into two broad currents, which he names simply Red and Blue. The Red books and images take up explicitly political subjects: the violence of war, the failures of capitalism, the wreckage left by greed and ecological disregard. They often employ photomontage in ways reminiscent of 1930s agitprop, juxtaposing glossy images of luxury with subtle signals of exploitation and poverty. They don’t shout so much as quietly indict.
The Blue strand is different, though not necessarily gentler. These works dream back towards Cyprus and Greece, conjuring myth and family lore, breathing with the lines of Greek poetry and the long light of the Mediterranean. They ask what it means to carry multiple homelands inside a single body, and how memory can be both a comfort and a weight.
This conceptual split shapes how Holloway and Klumpp have curated the exhibition, without reducing it to tidy categories. Instead, they’ve organised Silence is No Refuge into four thematic arcs that overlap and interweave: Language and Art, Imagined Homeland, Place and Protest, and Transcendence and Belonging. Each offers a different way into Lyssiotis’s concerns — how words fail or mutate under pressure, how migration haunts the idea of home, how art can bear witness, and how acts of making create refuge when national or cultural belonging breaks down.
The works and collaborations
The artist’s books themselves are the heart of this exhibition. They are small, sometimes deceptively modest objects, yet each contains a world stretching far beyond its stitched edges.
Among the earliest and most compelling examples is Feather and Prey (1997), a book that guides the reader through metaphors of hunting, vulnerability and survival. Lyssiotis uses embossing, richly textured papers and images that slip between clarity and blur. The book is not on display in the gallery; however, images from and inspired by Feather and Prey appear in the hanging banners and lightboxes.
In Homeland (2003), produced with Israeli-Australian artist Noga Freiberg, Lyssiotis explores overlapping migrant experiences. The book binds fragments of personal history to broader questions of how identity is formed, displaced or layered through multiple generations. It feels at once intimate and expansive, touching on the shared — if differently carried — legacies of diaspora.
Eyewitness (2008), created with Theo Strasser, Monica Oppen, Marieke Dench and Daphne Lera, exemplifies his Red works at their sharpest. The book arrives inside a dark fabric bag reminiscent of the hoods forced over detainees’ heads at Guantanamo Bay. Its hand-bound spine suggests prison bars, or perhaps mouths forcibly sewn shut. Inside, Lyssiotis layers headlines from newspapers and fragments of classroom texts with photo transfers that bleed under gouache and ink. The result is chilling: a meditation on complicity, censorship, and how easily language can be shaped to mask violence.
His later work Eidetics (2016), created with architect Leon Van Schaik and Wayne Stock, shifts back to the Blue. The title comes from the Greek eidos, meaning “form” or “shape,” and the book considers how places impress themselves on us, how memory carves its own structures long after we’ve left. Photomontages drift alongside Van Schaik’s essays and short poems, each page opening a quiet dialogue about perception and recollection.
Also woven through the show are artworks taken from The River, which uses repeated motifs of water and driftwood to explore the currents of migration.
Holloway and Klumpp have approached this project with clear respect for the book as a living, fragile art form. Rather than overwhelming viewers with heavy-handed panels, they’ve allowed the books themselves — with their scuffs, slight warping and delicate stitching — to stand as understated testaments to time, handling and the intimacy of reading.
Their aim was not simply to showcase Lyssiotis’s political edge or his lyrical memories, but to place these in conversation. By grouping works under overlapping themes, they’ve shown how he rarely draws strict lines between personal longing and social critique. Instead, one flows into the other. The Cyprus of family stories is never free of history’s scars; likewise, his critiques of global power often hinge on small human details — a letter home, a child’s shadow, a quiet joke that undercuts official narratives.
This also underscores why the artists’ book remains such a compelling medium. In a time dominated by screens and speed, these works resist. They demand attention and touch. They carry the marks of their maker’s hands and, increasingly, of every person who turns their pages. At Monash, with its strong holdings of artists’ books, the exhibition feels especially well placed. It’s also a reminder that libraries continue to matter as spaces not just for keeping fragile objects safe, but for encouraging public encounters with them.
What stands out most in Silence is No Refuge is how Lyssiotis’s books refuse to separate the political from the poetic. They carry memories of migration, lines of Greek verse, critiques of environmental degradation, and close observations of how easily societies slip into complicity. They do this not through large declarations but through the small, absorbing acts of turning a page, noticing a faint thread, pausing over a word set slightly askew.
In today’s climate — where debates around migration, national belonging and economic inequality are as charged as ever — Lyssiotis’s work feels quietly urgent. It offers no easy moral binaries. Instead, it invites us to inhabit discomfort, to recognise our part in larger systems, and to think more carefully about how private histories intersect with public forces.
By showing these works in an academic library, Holloway and Klumpp have highlighted how art can live outside traditional galleries, embedded in places dedicated to reading, research and thinking. The result is an exhibition that feels like an extended conversation — about what we remember, what we forget, and how small books can carry stories far larger than themselves.
READ MORE: An insightful interview with Peter Lyssiotis at: KalliopeX
Exhibition details
- Dates: 30th June 2025 – 30th June 2026
- Venue: The Gallery, Sir Louis Matheson Library, Monash University Clayton Campus
- Address: 40 Exhibition Walk, Clayton VIC 3168, Australia
- Opening Hours: During standard library hours
- Admission: Free
- More Info: Monash University Library Exhibitions
