Kiki Petratou

uitwisseling , mobiliteit , fotografie , Audiovisueel , Artistiek onderzoek , Analytisch

I am an artist and curator based in Rotterdam. My work — in both roles — centers around transformation, domesticity, and lived experience. As an artist, I use photography, video, text, and moving image to explore how personal and collective narratives unfold through everyday materials, gestures, and spaces. I’m drawn to the subtle, the layered, and the in-between — often creating works that gently shift perceptions and invite reflection.

As a curator, I explore broader territories while maintaining a similar ethos. I work with artists and designers whose practices challenge static ideas of function, identity, and form — often through absurd, poetic, or unexpected interventions. My exhibitions are shaped as spaces of hospitality and exchange, where audiences are invited to engage deeply, slowly, and on their own terms.

Across both practices, I see making and curating as interconnected forms of storytelling — grounded in empathy, curiosity, and a desire to open up new ways of seeing and being together.

**Recession Sessions | No More Heroes Anymore** - 2015 - Ongoing, Duratrans, Lightbox, Variable Dimensions

**Recession Sessions | No More Heroes Anymore** - 2015 - Ongoing, Duratrans, Lightbox, Variable Dimensions

**Standing Still** - "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.

**Five Senses of Vilnius: Taste | Mixed Media Installation in Public Space & Performance** - 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 ethnic 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.

**I Still Hate Thatcher** - "I Still Hate Thatcher" is based on photographic material taken in the streets of Athens, Greece. The photographs depict a mix of graffiti, written text and posters in public spaces whose focus alternates between political, social, football related and love messages. The work re-approaches these messages by combining images in a double projection to re-tell the story of a city in a non-linear manner.

**Red Laces** - 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 depicted individuals in an intimate and murky atmosphere. The relationship 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.

**The Nigerian Story - A True Story** - 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 depicted individuals in an intimate and murky atmosphere. The relationship 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.

**HOTEL ROOMS | Island of Dreams** - The photo-series HOTEL ROOMS | Island of Dreams, was realised during the 1st international open art residency, Island of Dreams, Eretria, Greece

**ILLUMINATORS** - ILLUMINATORS, Koltsovo, Yekaterinburg, Russia, Photo by Evgene Belikov -------------------------------------- - The exposition of Illuminators exhibition visually and conceptually coincides 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.

**PERSONAE** - 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 (although arguably with the 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. Text: Charlotte McLaughlin (writer and critic).

**Unsuspected Time** - "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.

**Places We Meet, 2025, Textile, 220 x 160 cm** - The quilt, sewn from tote bags collected at art fairs and cultural events worldwide, becomes a fabric of encounters — a soft archive of places, networks, and shared moments. At once an invitation and a metaphor, the work explores the emotional and spatial dimensions of hospitality: how we inhabit spaces together, how art travels, and how meaning is woven through connection. "Places We Meet", was first presented in the group exhibition "The Way We Live Together Now" at the EINS apartment in the framework of Limassol Art Walks 2025 (Limassol, Cyprus)

**STATES OF PRESENCE / Mountain, House, Bed, Analogue Prints on Ilford Glossy Photo Paper 48x62cm** - States of Presence (2026) unfolds in six analogue photographs that explore the shifting conditions of the body in relation to memory, space, and identity. The first three images portray the artist's mother on a balcony in the city where the artist grew up, her gaze oscillating between rest, play, and subtle theatricality, framed against the enduring presence of a mountain landscape. The remaining three works turn inward: pillows and the facade of the artist's home host her own superimposed figure, created in the darkroom. Across the series, the photographs trace a movement from presence to absence to transformation, revealing how bodies, domestic objects, and architecture intersect to shape memory and selfhood. From mountain to house to bed, presence quietly shifts and lingers.

The Day After Tomorrow

Datum: 01-07-2020 t/m 21-08-2020

Locatie: JOEY RAMONE

In samenwerking met: Tudor Bratu, Momu and No Es, Iratxe Jaio - Klaas van Gorkum, Harm Weistra, Cihad Caner, Ilke Gers, Fotini Gouseti, Thijs Ebbe Fokkens, Yasser Ballemans, Roi Alter

The Day After Tomorrow brings together a number of works that deconstruct the concepts of time and labor.

https://www.joeyramone.nl/

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