Lito Kattou at opbo studio / Piraeus

Lito Kattou 
LANDS/SexLife

curated by Ioanna Gerakidi 

June 30 – July 27, 2023 

opbo studio
86 Filonos Str., Piraeus, 18536 

Photo: Stathis Mamalakis



«LANDS/SexLife»: solo show by Lito Kattou at opbo studio, curated by
Ioanna Gerakidi

The independent
art space opbo studio announces the opening of Lito Kattou’s solo exhibition
titled “LANDS/SexLife”, curated by Ioanna Gerakidi, on Friday, June 30th at 8
pm. In LANDS/SexLife, Kattou ponders and expands on the characteristics and
symbolisms of the mantis as a species encountering life through survival, sex
through shielding, resistance through cannibalism. Through a new body of work
consisting of reliefs and other sculptural gestures, Kattou traces the
circularity of time as an a-chronical structure, the fatality appended on the
femme identity as a parable for protecting life and the landscape as a means
for altering the dominant geopolitical narratives.

In
LANDS/SexLife, the otherworldly, the uncanny, and the infinite are being
mapped, inviting the audience to experience it as an act of seduction revealing
other desires, sexes, successes, and safe spaces. In the exhibition opening,
this parallel and unexplored universe will be activated through an ongoing
performance that engages with Kattou’s reliefs, functioning as a mantra for the
audience’s entry into the
omniversal world.

Lito Kattou (Nicosia, 1990)
is a visual artist based in Athens. Her works negotiate understandings of
materiality and subjectivity through a composition of practices, spanning from
digital fabrication to thermochemical elaborations. Her practice raises
questions around the relationship between humans, animals, the environment and
technology, symbiosis and alterity.

Kattou is the
recipient of the Ducato Prize 2019 and the New Positions Award for Art Cologne
2018 and she has been the invited artist at the Fonderia Battaglia, Fondation
Thalie Brussels, Art Hub Copenhagen, PCAI Contemporary Art Initiative and 89
plus Google residencies. Recent solo shows have been presented at Fondazione
Pomodoro, ICA Milano, TRANEN Copenhagen, Duarte Sequeira Gallery Braga, T293
Rome, Artothek Cologne, Benaki Museum Athens, Point Centre for Contemporary Art
Nicosia. Among her activity she has participated in various group shows in
museums, galleries and art spaces as at SAVVY Contemporary Berlin, the Onassis
Foundation, in the Athens Biennale 7, the National Gallery Sofia, Culturgest
Porto, Fidelidade Arte Lisbon, Ludwig Muzeum Budapest, Nottingham Contemporary,
Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Berlin, Benaki Museum and Deste Foundation, Athens.

Performance contributors:

Clothes: 2WO+1NE=2

Make up / hair styling: Sofia Kossada 

Performers: Eleni Alexopoulou, Anna Anoussaki, Leda Dalla, Stavros Kastrinakis, Konstantina Barkouli, Rafael Sidiropoulos, Georgina Choleva

LANDS/SexLife
curatorial text:

[…]

there’s an insect

that in order to survive

eats their
partner after sex

the females do so to protect

their babies

it’s called
mantis religiosa

mantis

-from the greek word mania-

another story imposing

hysteria upon

a feminised act
of rage

and religion

a rereading on
the female identity

google says

that mantises are in the same category as cockroaches

do you know what Audre Lorde writes about roaches

she writes

“call me your deepest urge toward survival”*

[…]

For her solo
exhibition LANDS/SexLife and through a new body of work, Kattou ponders and
expands on the characteristics and symbolisms of the mantis as a species
encountering life through survival, sex through shielding, resistance through
cannibalism. By exposing a series of reliefs tracing the circularity of time as
an a-chronical structure, the fatality appended on the femme identity as a
parable for protecting life and the landscape as a means for altering the
dominant geopolitical narratives, Kattou’s new body of work aims to utter, write
or compile the intangible documents required for making a cartography of the
otherworldly, the uncanny, the infinite.

In this series
of works, the relief, a word coming from the Latin verb relevo, meaning to
raise, acts as a repetitive, yet not identical scheme, which when seen as a mantra
enlivens our potential to exist in an omniversal world. And it’s precisely
through this activation of a parallel current that we, audiences, are led to
the unknown, to the seductive qualities of what has never been encountered
before, erotically and otherwise. In one of her recent interviews, Tina Campt
writes about what it takes to “think things together, synaesthetically”; she
invites us to listen to the sound of paintings, look at the scenes of sonic
pieces, touch the smell of the bodies occupying the space. This multilayered
activation of being and interacting with our surroundings is what LANDS/SexLife
is suggesting.

And along with
the works navigating us through a linear, yet mythical narrative, acting not
only as gestural promises, but as agents carrying the mantises’ psyches,
there’s a human presence, even in its absence. Lethargic bodies, enchanted by
the spells, the whispering voices of mantises, are experiencing the pleasure of
being static, of occupying a revealing inertia. Their structured lives,
schedules, postures have dissolved; the magnetic qualities of a capsule pausing
all of the world’s accelerations has stimulated another kind of alienation.
One, that allows a withdrawal from a violent, canonical, systemic attachment.
Their performative gestures only last for a few hours; yet the traces of their
metamorphosis will always be present in the space, blessing the depths of
dissonance.

LANDS/SexLife
longs to be lived as an ethereal inquiry, asking the questions: What does it
take to reframe the habitual orbits in order to find other types of the
celestial? How can we look at and with the unearthly and the numinous, not as
intimidating schemes but as seductive acts divulging other desires, sexes,
successes and safe spaces?

Ioanna Gerakidi

~

*excerpt from the text “Μα ακόμα δεν χόρτασαν;” by Ioanna Gerakidi published in 2021 for the occasion of Lito
Kattou’s exhibition Myriad worlds of Ours, T293 x Paganico Sabino