Artist Statement


My artistic and academic interests encompass the visual arts, literature and certain medical matters.
The conflict between the condition of the human body and discursive language is the core of my practice, which addresses aspects of corporeality as a continuous narration, a text ‘in process’ which I describe as bodygraphy.
Combining performance art, photography, video, text, drawing and installations as the main media for my works, I both search for visual representations of the body in crisis, of physical and mental illness and of isolation, and analyse issues relating to awareness, the boundaries and possibilities of language, the body’s vulnerability, pain, loss and exclusion, and to the inexpressibility of these states verbally.
The crucial question of my practice concerns how to express the experience of the body in crisis through art? How to break away from the Ill=Other cliché and bypass flaunting illness as an attraction or emotional blackmail?
In my art, I investigate forms of visual essay and performative narrative as a medical, socially engaged and artistic strategy that goes beyond the strictly private and stereotypical, ill-person–doctor circle and contributes to social and medical knowledge about invisible diseases, vulnerability, identity and the abilities of the diverse human body. Creating a space for potentiality and positive categories in the field of representation of boundary experiences I develop my own concepts of affective art practice – a non-exploitative, caring method of creative work regulated by the body’s rhythms.
I use two methods of work; intimate, studio-based practice and collaboration with universities, scientists, technicians, linguists, medical consultants and volunteers. I also develop projects and workshops during artistic residencies, and through gallery and museum commissions.
In my artistic research, I am particularly focused on the phenomenon of the (ill) female body as a book or a map, a repository of afflictive experience and memories which determine individual identity. It is based on a broad, holistic sense of women’s expression, on the processes of suppressing the ill, female body in the history of literature, and on the reification of the image of ill women in the history of art. The purpose of my practice lies in my intense desire to analyse both the status of the ill human body in the wide context of postmodern culture and its inclusion in contemporary society, while the methodological framework of my research fits with post-modern theories of performative corporeality and studies on socio-cultural relations.

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