Portfolio

By giving time, you create space.

Kyriakos Apostolidis (b. Drama, Greece 1991) is a performance artist and movement director with a developing practice-based research project in performance titled Morphoplastics. They work with the human body as a primary artistic medium and self-referential subject, examining plasticity in the phenomenology of presence within performance art. Their live performances present endurance and movement-based actions while involving audio-visual installations in the intersection of art & technology and expanded cinema.

Artist Statement

My inspiration to create art has always stemmed from an innate need to reveal and manifest the essence of the human body. Through my practice, titled Morphoplastics, I explore the underlying principles of performance and creation which are rooted in the nature of the human body and human communication. Between art and life, I see the human body as the actual mediator and performance as the meeting point. It is at this intersection, the experience of being present materializes, giving a concrete form to what it means to be human, while the performer’s sensitivity enables the space of the present experience to open up, through which the body finds its own way to make its essence apparent. It is from this stance, physical expression has the power to empathetically impact other individuals and create an intersubjective experience between the performer and the audience that penetrates social structures, redefining them. Therefore, building my artistic language upon the ecology of the human body itself, I use performance as a platform to study my own body and to expand and establish new boundaries surrounding the understanding of the human body.

Works

The performance “Stillness” was structured in three phases. In the first phase, the performer performed a continuously ongoing endurance action, holding their arms horizontally elevated for 7 hours and 45 minutes before the audience arrived in the space. In the second phase, the audience witnessed the performance. With the performer wearing a brainwave sensor, a self-feedback loop is created in which their bio-data are converted into vibrations, directed through a resonant platform and returned back to and pass through the performer’s body to influence their movement. At the same time, a real-time video projection presented the performer’s body from different angles. In the third phase, the performer left from the platform, becoming part of the audience. The video documentation of the performer stepping on the platform at the beginning of the first phase projected, transforming the performance space into a video installation.