BIO
Sofia Kouloukouri is a visual artist and writer with a background in cinema studies and art history. 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 works as a script-coach for film-makers and aspiring writers, while writing articles on cinema and contemporary art for Greek magazines Ta Nea tis Texnis and Inside Story, as well as Swiss cultural review GenèveActive. She lives and works between Geneva and Athens.
STATEMENT
My work has two poles, endurance and narrative. In it, ancient techniques evoking the eternal life of minerals, such as ceramics and stone, coexist with contemporary media such as drone videos, Arduino microcontrollers and performance.
Endurance concerns mainly the performative aspect of the works as well as its central theme, weight. My first performance was a public ‘workout’ (Poids libres, 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, myth, and Christian doctrine, which are all linked somehow to my Greek heritage. My most recent projects (The Principle and Eve: my side of the story) 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 most 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 recent project Women Telling the Future (Espace Saules d’Out, Geneva) united Greek women practicing divination, with a traditional; non-commercial 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. The performance apparatus was set so that several cultural reflexes between « the East and the West » materialized, as open concepts, without being staged. Amongst them, the representation of women (especially subjects qualifying as exotic) in classical occidental painting, and the way neoclassical art embraces ancient Greek ideals with soft feminine passivity, remains in the heart of our interests. All the more as it contrasts both with the role of the female artist, and that of the witch.
