Artist statement
Sofia Kouloukouri is a visual artist and performer with a background in cinema studies (MA) and art history (MA). She has shown work, amongst others, at the MCBA (Lausanne), the Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen,), the Triennial of Valais, the Biennale of artist-run spaces Geneva, Platforms Art Athina, Manoir de Martigny, A. Antonopoulou gallery (Athens), and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. She lives and works in Athens.
“My work has two poles, endurance and narrative. Endurance concerns mainly the performative aspect of the works as well as its central theme, weight. My first performance Poids libres was a public workout (Cornavin station, Geneva) with free weights that I had carved myself in limestone and soapstone. Weights, literal or metaphorical, borne by the female body, are a constant in my work. They can be traced back to the fundamental education of girls, myths, and the Christian doctrine, which are all linked somehow to my Greek heritage. My most recent projects The Principle and EVE SYNDROME draw on these archetypes to make a re-appropriation of the Book of Genesis focusing on the character of Eve the mother of all humanity.
In other cases, my texts, short phrases or theatrical monologues, diary entries, fictional user manuals, instructions for mapping a terrain, or even an entire novel, involve ‘autofiction’. In an intimate confessional tone or an elaborate novelistic one my narratives point at female characters voicing their opinions on art, life and ‘couple politics’.
Another aspect of my work, this time in collaboration with performance artist Vana Kostayola, is an interest in feminine rituals of reclaiming power (real or spiritual). In that vein, our project Women Telling the Future (Espace Saules d’Out, Geneva; MCBA, Lausanne; Grand Palais, Bern) united Greek women practicing a traditional; non-commercial divination ritual, cafedomancy – the reading of the future in coffee grounds. In a succulent neo-oriental salon, the public was offered a rendezvous with an oracle as well as a series of activities to get rid of trauma, activities such as crawling, drawing, writing and smashing things. Influenced both by the festive ambiance of the greek ‘bouzoukia’ subculture as well as Christian ritualistic practices, this participative performance transformed the public into actors occupying the center of the scene. The performance apparatus was set so that several cultural reflexes between « the East and the West » materialized as open concepts, without being staged, and the women acting as mediators played both with the role of the female artist, and that of the witch.
When creating a performance, and that is valid both for EVE SYNDROME and Women Telling the Future, I try to invent ways of engaging and activating the public, as the traditional distinction between performer and audience does not interest me. In contrast what fascinates me is the possibility that the performance is like a question the performer asks and then opens up to the public to answer by themselves. Very often their reactions are more unforeseeable and original that I could ever have fabricated, so somehow the public’s behavior and contribution is also a way for me to discover what lies within my subject through the prism of participation.
Also, I think that performance, in a time of screens, alienation and distancing is a time of communion and real contact as well as a time when matters can be voiced directly and clearly in a space jointly created by the performer, the situation established, and the audience. Within this space one realizes that collaboration is much easier than we tend to think in the ‘real life’.