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 movement-based endurance actions while involving audio-visual installations in the intersection of art & technology and expanded cinema.

Artist Statement

Through the project Morphoplastics, I envision a cutting edge perspective for the field of performance that will radically redefine what the human body is, within and beyond art. Art is a lens through which humans give a concrete form to life. Performance is the form of art where art actually meets life and where the human body becomes the mediator and the pivot of this relationship. It is at this point where what the human body is, through the performer’s present body, becomes an open question. I seek to capture something that is deeply rooted in the human condition and articulate it through physical expression. I want to share my investigations with others and create an intersubjective experience between myself and my audience. Thus, I try to understand how the principles of performance and creation exist in the nature of the human body and human communication. Through my art, I attempt to pierce the core of human experience in order to reveal and manifest the essence of the human body. Physical expression has the power to empathetically impact other individuals, penetrating social and cultural structures, thus redefining the role of and establishing a new ethos around 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.