With a background in architecture and the visual arts, Nefeli Papadimouli works across media, from participatory actions in public space to sculpture, photography, drawing, costume design, moving image, installation and performance. Inspired by phenomenology, feminism and contemporary political theory, her proto-architectural approach explores spatial configurations of distance as essential elements in processes of social conflict, negotiation and equilibrium.
Informed by utopian architectural and artistic avant-gardes as much as contemporary dance, her series of modular, connective, elastic sculptures function at once as prompts for collective movement and architectures of assembly, investigating the interdependence of cultural and natural forms and exploring the notion of space through its relationship to the body. Conceived as spaces of encounter, her radically inclusive works manifest a desire to engage the bodies of performers and spectators, humans and non-humans, in gestures and reciprocal movements, in settings ranging from museum spaces to urban and natural environments. Like a second skin, her costumes both produce and dissolve the boundaries of the body, individual and collective, in a playful and emancipatory shift of perspective. Her works and performances thus stimulate behavioural patterns and collective processes to create affirmative grounds for the emergence of a critical spatial and bodily practice that destabilises preconceived notions of identity and alterity. Her drawings, photographs and videos similarly inhabit the space between performance, document, trace and graphic notation. The artist's continued engagement with relational patterns and collective movement places Papadimouli’s practice in direct relation to abstraction as an artistic and political language while her playful blurring of boundaries between sculpture, drawing, photography, live forms and durational media associates her with the historical avant-gardes. ...
T H E P I L L was founded in 2016 by Suela J. Cennet in the historic peninsula of Istanbul, to operate as a global platform and mobile vessel for contemporary art, supporting artists through a dynamic of cosmopolitanism beyond the dialectics of center and periphery. Initially envisioned by its founder as a space for an aesthetic of friendship, the gallery's programming is strongly inspired by the history and ideas of utopia and dystopia in modernism, with a particular focus on displacement, diaspora, feminisms, and queer aesthetics as reflected in contemporary artistic practices. ...
