Artist statement
I am a painter, installation, media and performance artist who explores the limits and the interfaces between performance and painting since the 1990s. My practice engages the spectator/participant to a “new” form of theatre that integrates performativity as a catalyst of our daily life. Theatrical conventions and props are applied to visual practices such as masks made from living materials including animals or plants. My video installations have been exhibited at a variety of distinguished venues and contemporary art institutions including:
The Serpentine Gallery, FACT Liverpool, The Bluecoat, in Frieze Art Fair London, in Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, twice in the Tate Modern, in Toynbee Studios and in Artsadmin, in CGAC de Santiago de Compostela, at the Chelsea Theatre in London this last year and in Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin with the project “Goya Prophet der Moderne” at 2005, /“Les Bourgeois de Calais”- Performance and several other venues.
My main motivation is to explore authentic identity versus performed identity, considering the often polarized, fragmented identities that we perform daily. I seek to bring the interiorized authentic self and the exterior constructed self together. My broader goal is to examine and scrutinize socially constructed patterns of behavior by creating situations in which the participants break or transcend the internal feedback loops that control their own actions and address the power structures we inhabit and perpetuate. Meanwhile I wish to release the intense emotions of joy and sorrow, desire and hatred, hope and despair that were once considered as the passions of the soul. Working with masks made of perishable materials from food, fish, fruit, shrimps, lobsters bound on the face and body, I aim to recall the “shamanistic” exorcism of the history of Western theatre.