Morphoplastics

About

Founded by Kyriakos Apostolidis (b. Drama, Greece 1991), Morphoplastics is an interdisciplinary, practice-based research project in the field of performance, centered on the kinesthetic psychophysical awareness (KPA) of the performer. Using movement as a primary means of expression and sense-making, KPA makes use of perception and duration to explore the affective capacities of the performing body and tap into prehension, resulting in postural reconfigurations. This movement research works on modalities of enacted, embodied agency to investigate proprioceptive forms of being and knowing, modes of becoming understood as an onto-epistemological inquiry. This insightful practice is a methodological inward-turn and experimental exercise in which the performer draws lines of correspondence from within transductive cognitive processes understood as intra-action. Apostolidis’s live performances present endurance actions by holding still positions. They also incorporate biometrics and video-projection in the creation of audio-visual installations that expand physical expression to a multi-sensory experience.

“Morphoplastics,” is a compound word from the combination of morph (Greek: μορφή) which means to undergo a gradual transformation in form or transition from one state to another, while in Greek refers to the overall external visual form or contour that characterizes a physical body, and the word plastic (Greek: πλαστικό) which refers to something protean whose materiality has the capacity to be shaped and to change into many different potential forms.

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” —Albert Einstein

“To think intuitively is to think in duration.” —Henri Bergson

“Exercise_Finger Index” is an exercise based on the act of stepping and of drawing a processual connection between two indexes of attention—internal and external, split on two sides, right and left. The performer taps into an in-between, transitional space of movement articulation where trace the edges of their perception while their postural configurations reveal curving and twisting shapes, also known as figura serpentinata.

“You should draw not what the thing looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing… Gesture has no precise edges, no exact shape, no jelled form. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space.”
—Kimon Nicolaides

“The body is not defined by its organs or functions, but by what it can do — its affects, its speeds, its slownesses, its capacities for affecting and being affected.”
—Gilles Deleuze

Research Statement

I see art beyond symbols and identity, in its first place, existing as a pure creative process in the act of feeling and perceiving. Such a relationship constitutes the basis of my practice, the way of viewing the artist’s body as the first medium where affect and cognition as psychophysical, biological processes involve consciousness. This approach opens a field of research, I call Morphoplastics. Here, embodied presence turns to a critical examination and where movement is the means with which to understand the material agency of being a body. This performative kind of research concerns a rigorous integration of both body-based epistemology, the study of knowing, and ontology, the study of being. This inquiry is better understood as living practice, an evolving mediation between potentiality and actuality, an ongoing process of becoming. Here, nothing is fixed and finished, but exists in the realm of the relational and entangled nature of reality that creates the enabling conditions for research to converge and coalesce into new, ever-advancing forms of coherence. Physical expression is nothing more than exploration of one’s capacities of feeling and perceiving through a kinesthetic, intelligent movement of empowerment. This is morphoplasticity, the agency over one’s own individual becoming as an evolving process of changing and taking on new embodied forms.

Seeking precision and originality, Morphoplastics pursues to eliminate the boundaries between art and life where creativity is inherent in our evolution as humans. Art provides a lens to manifest this idea and performance the space to extend it to everyday. I see this secular approach to be a singularity that also responds to our current time of radical change. Performance becomes a platform where the disciplinary boundaries between art, science, and philosophy merge into a living practice in a reconsideration of the human body—both in our understanding of and approach towards it—thus offering a contemporary commentary on human potential. Morphoplastics attempts to become a conduit for social change with practice being a creative means of thinking and making that exists as being much like knowing in motion—a both individual and collective coming-into-a-new-being as an embodied understanding. The art of becoming.

Biography

Born in Drama, Greece, Kyriakos Apostolidis is a movement-based artist and researcher, founder of Morphoplastics. He holds a MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an Integrated Master in Painting & Drawing from the School of Visual & Applied Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He also studied at the Universidad de Granada. His studies have been supported by the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation through the “Alexis Minotis In Memory of Katina Paxinou” endowment, and the Erasmus+ Studies program. He worked for the organization Chicago DanceMakers Forum.

His work has been presented in the international conference ReVIEWING 15 (Asheville, 2025), Luminaria Contemporary Art Festival (San Antonio, 2025), {Re}HAPPENING (Black Mountain, 2025), ION Gallery (Kansas City, 2024), Torsos in Rain (NYC, 2024), An Emptying’ 24h Performance Program (New Paltz, 2024), Impact Performance Festival (Chicago, 2024), Festival Arte/Acción (Mexico City, 2023). He has also participated in the 2nd Biennale Larnaca (Larnaca, 2021), 7th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, 2019), Inspire Project 2018 / Christopher Makos: Face the strange (Thessaloniki, 2018), and 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, 2017).