My activities as artist, curator and gallery owner are being intertwined, shifted if not totally blurred. I try to answer the questions that guide my artistic practice sometimes through curating other artists, other times through my own work. I believe in the model of the artist that co-operates with his fellow artists within the frame of contemporaneity. I am interested in examining how exchange and co-operation tactics may function as strategies used to stimulate social and cultural capital. My work focuses on concepts of place, location, mobility and identity. As photographer and video artist I embrace the fluidity of the mediums' properties to document the raw and real and, contrastingly, also to stage and style the less real. Subsequently although my photographic series and video installations keep a connection to the documentary recording they simultaneously transform everyday reality. More specifically the resulting works employ the medium's properties of time and space to investigate physical and social bounderies.
Kiki Petratou - Recession Sessions, Duratrans, Lightbox
Kiki Petratou - "Standing Still" is made of a series of events, small blocks of movement filmed in my neighborhood in Rotterdam. It presents people in exterior environments and people and spaces in interior environments side by side, like a clash of two everyday realities. I understand them to be fragmentary depictions - sketches of a whole, of an ordinary and banal nature. My intention so far is to refocus the documentary attitude of the viewer. The viewer is not supposed to think of these scenes as 'real' but as arrangements of objects - not real lives but still lives.
Kiki Petratou - "Unsuspected Time" is an experimental work playing with anxiety, obsession and drama. It investigates the boundaries between documentary and fiction. It unfolds between scenes of nightlife in the center of Rotterdam, which juxtaposed with a private performance puts in context the game of the gaze with what it was witnessed and references the atmosphere seen in detective stories and mystery movies.
Kiki Petratou - PERSONAE. Photo Series.
The ingenuity of film and photography as art medium lies in its flexibility - most effective in documenting the raw and real and contrastingly also in staging and styling the less real. As photographer and video artist, Kiki Petratou embraces this fluidity. All protagonists in her 'Personae' series (though arguably with exception of Jan the professional dreamer) are removed from their titled vocational context. There is nothing to define Thera as the web designer or Monica as the civil servant. Instead the viewer is drawn towards an identity that is personal and delicate. Aptly reflecting the intricacy of what can form identity - an overt theme of much of Petratou's work - this series is by no means unambiguous. On the one hand her documentary style portraits capture a banal and raw reality typical of Martin Parr's works - all subjects are situated in mundane settings of everyday life. However, unlike Parr's subjects who are oblivious to an outside gaze, Petratou's are engaged with the viewer. There is a strange mix of vulnerability and empowerment as the subject's confront the viewer as we intrude into an intensely personal space. This combined with dramatic use of color and lighting contributes towards a stylized representation. Part documentary and part theater, Petratou's construction of the intimate only serves to heighten the complexity and potentiality of an apparently bounded identity. Charlotte McLaughlin is a writer and critic.
Kiki Petratou - HOTEL ROOMS ↳ Island of Dreams, Eretria, Greece
Kiki Petratou - I Still Hate Thatcher is based on photographic material taken in the streets of Athens, Greece. The photographs depict a mix of grafiti, written text and posters in public spaces whose focus alternates between political, social, football related and love messages. The work re-approapriates these messages by combining images in a double projection to re-tell the story of a city in a non-linear manner.
Kiki Petratou - ILLUMINATORS, Koltsovo, Yekaterinburg, Russia, Photo by Evgene Belikov -------------------------------------- - The exposition of Illuminators exhibition visually and conceptually coincide with the name of the airport Koltsovo (koltso is Russian for a ring; ring - round). The exhibition opened on the eve of the Day of Cosmonautics. Russian cosmonautics started to some extend in Koltsovo as the first jet engines were tested here. The project is aimed to create a positive, emotionally rich environment in the waiting rooms of the international terminal. Besides the exhibition provides the passengers and guests of the airport with the recent achievements of international contemporary art.
Kiki Petratou - The slide projection "The Nigerian Story - A True Story" - a collaboration between Petratou and Dutch poet Joris Lenstra - examines identity, idealism and its related meanings and unravels the priorities of values, principles, ideals and goals over concrete realities. Here determination and forgetfulness, romanticism and hard reality intertwine only to highlight the unstable nature of ideas over time and to stress how adjusting to the norm may interfere in such a way so that certain ideals minimize, change or become suppressed. The resulting works are a combination of text - usually handwritten with chalk on a blackboard and photographed - and image - capturing the equivocal position of the portrayed individuals in an intimate and murky atmosphere. The relation however between image and text does not develop in a literal way but rather absurd and more associative. This combined with dramatic use of color and lighting contributes towards a stylized representation.
Kiki Petratou - The slide projection "Red laces" - a collaboration between Petratou and Dutch poet ko norderisk - examines identity, idealism and its related meanings and unravels the priorities of values, principles, ideals and goals over concrete realities. Here determination and forgetfulness, romanticism and hard reality intertwine only to highlight the unstable nature of ideas over time and to stress how adjusting to the norm may interfere in such a way so that certain ideals minimize, change or become suppressed. The resulting works are a combination of text - usually handwritten with chalk on a blackboard and photographed - and image - capturing the equivocal position of the portrayed individuals in an intimate and murky atmosphere. The relation however between image and text does not develop in a literal way but rather absurd and more associative. This combined with dramatic use of color and lighting contributes towards a stylized representation.
Kiki Petratou - Five Senses of Vilnius invited artists from Lithuania Italy, Russia, UK, Sweden, Germany, USA, Belgium, the Netherlands, Croatia and Israel to participate in the project: create together with an untraditional perception of urban history and the history of the Vilnija Region , its culture and environment through the five senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. -------------------- The aim of the project was to produce a functional, aesthetic, long-term and value lasting souvenir Vilniaus simbolis, erupting from the dominion of "amber Gediminas Tower pictures "and highlighting the unique tradition of Vilnius dialogue, the coexistence of ethnical communities, and Vilnius as a city open to the idea of Europe. ------------------------ In co-operation with Architect Gabriele Zanoni, Graphic designers Gleb Solntsev and Ron Yosef, Choreographer and food Specialist Rasa Alksnyte we created a mapping of the history of Vilnius in relation to the Sense of Taste.
