Fani Parali

Royal Academy of Arts / Post graduate in Fine Art

The Angels
Fani Parali
Moving Image

Fani Parali - Artist Statement:  
I was born in Greece, but have been living in London for the past 7 years. A starting point -that will help put my practice in context- is the fact that I have worked in the theatre as a scenic artist for more than 15 years, making props and painting backdrops.?This has influenced my work on various different levels and the practice has been brought to its current place first through a BA degree on the Sculpture course at Camberwell and now through the postgraduate Fine Art course at the Royal Academy Schools, which I will be completing in June. I make large scale installations that most often include sculptural objects / costumes, moving image, recorded sound, text and very importantly, live performative elements too. I create situations where the different medium components are choreographed through directing and collaborating with performers. I am hoping that the work allows an experience of daydreaming-turn-into reality, occurring in fragments of lucid encounters. I use lip-synching a lot, so the ghostly characters emerge within the work, through mediating already pre-recorded voices. Through the process of orchestrating and editing, I aim to occupy the space that hovers between shared intimacy and aloneness.

Breezing Through Closer (top)
Fani Parali
Mixed Media

Let them in
Fani Parali
Mixed Media

Haus of Perestroika
Simona Sharafudinov
Living sculpture, durational performance 30 hours over 5 days.

Simona Sharafudinov - Artist Statement:    
My interest lies in questioning the process of image making in relation to exiled identity and idealized systems of value. Through the process I aim to move away from ubiquity of representation and flat imagery into a process of performativity where the body becomes the machine. Working across a range of media and framing the body as architecture and architecture as body, the aim is to create a mythical spaces where the process of subjectivity is considered. I attempt to blur binary borders between: immigrant and citizen; real and imaginary; self and other; abject and composed; order and chaos; freedom and captivity; private and public; civilized and barbaric; strange and familiar; compassion and dominance; to reveal contradictions and coexistence of the conflicting states. The focus is to render affective imagery and make visible the continuous inner tensions of human existence. Often stemming from feelings of hopelessness, fear and insecurity and are instinctual reaction against idealism, a superfluous reflection system, which dictates social obsessions and standards.

Pope (top)
Simona Sharafudinov
Installation and performance in a collaboration with Lucrezia de Fazio, combining our drawing styles to sculpt the room, my performance together with her video performance

Envoi
Simona Sharafudinov
A square mirrored cube inside the gallery with peepholes offering 160 degrees view into the inside of the cube, which was a performance space, durational performance of 30 hours over 5 days

i caress you, you caress me, without unity
Natalie Kynigopoulou

Natalie Kynigopoulou - Artist Statement:   
 I work between photography, objects, more recently early animation and 16mm film. Sound has recently also become particularly important, as in for instance i caress you, you caress me, without unity for which I used an analogue sound synthesiser to directly respond to the imagery of the film. Fiction, play and the exercise of an imagination are tools I use in order to build new narratives. I use them in an attempt to challenge the hierarchical relation between subject and object and instead convey a sense in which all things, non-human or in-animate have an agency of their own. Morfars Ställe, 2016, for instance, which is English means my grandfather’s place, is a homage to my grandfather, drawing on my childhood memories of planting and cropping potatoes with him. The installation includes a self-regulating potato system, that I built using found materials, as well as several found photographs of my grandfather’s garden mounted on the walls. The potato system works on a timer and the potatoes are self-watered at intervals. Any excess water flows back into the system, and my intention is to create a circadian rhythm that responds to the processes of the natural environment.

Beyond Language (top)
Natalie Kynigopoulou

Morfars Ställe
Natalie Kynigopoulou

How I Speak (When I Am Spoken To)
Jade Blackstock

Jade Blackstock - Artist Statement:  
My work often looks at dialogues of the ‘marked’ body in relation to concerns of the political and cultural. In my practice, themes of race, femininity, loss and resistance tie together with explorations of spectacle, constructed identity and social commentary. I tend to make very material- based performances, to produce visual and fragmented narratives which combine the conceptual, historical and physical qualities of materials with the physicality and limitations of my body. I tend to use foods, condiments, various synthetic liquids and carriers such as bowls to create silent works that inhabit stillness. I am inspired by the aesthetics of minimalism – I try to create images that are formal and sculptural - in an attempt to somehow crystallise a message or statement. Dialogues with materials, be it conceptual, historical or formal are a core component of my practice. Clarity in form and openness in meaning are also important in my work. The urgency of performance, present quality of the body, and frankness of the body are some of the reasons why the discipline of performance appeals to me.

Untitled (top)
Jade Blackstock

Chicken Dialogue
Jade Blackstock

Pearl Diving
Tomasz Kobialka

Tomasz Kobialka - Artist Statement:   
Central to my practice is a critical interest in technology. I often use the devices of technological progress in order to examine the cultural conditions which contribute to technological production. Specifically, I am interested in the role of project management methodologies play in constructing identity and shaping our everyday relationships. My practice is often informed by autobiographical experiences, through which I examine my own implicated position towards cultural attitudes. For me it is clear that daily social and emotional reality exists at an intersection between the virtual and material worlds. The overarching subject in my practice is the human body and the resulting tensions of inhabiting this in-between space. I am interested in exploring the fragility of this emergent, fractured state in relation to software end-user licence agreements, which are legally binding but often overlooked by users. I often intentionally break, hack or crack into software and hardware technological artefacts in an attempt to escape from their programmed intentionality and to propose an alternative systematic desire. Legal ambiguity is an important political gesture as it places the work on a fragile foundation with potential for collapse.

Deadshit (top)
Tomasz Kobialka

Pastebin.dump
Tomasz Kobialka

Variation of Flowers
Jiaqing Mo

Jiaqing Mo - Artist Statement:   
My accomplishment in the art field centres upon construction of conceptions, my works cover video, theatre, performance and installation. My theme always about relationship, time, endless, instability... But each piece has specific theme by different objects and atmosphere I created. I would like to build strange objects for supporting my theme which makes time and space disappear or disorder. I collect many clips idea from every daily life, then contribute them to a work which has own system while researching reference and information. I want to indicate the relationship between objects and human life by using strange human action or human-made objects, I also think about function of everything exists in this world, so even I use human body in my work, I consider them as objects' meaning. I am interested in the artificial and alive things, I always build objects for my videos, I also put installation and performance inside of video for showing my ideas. Finally I show multiple-works with video, media, and live performance.

Unstable Geometry (top)
Jiaqing Mo

Disintegration
Jiaqing Mo

Untitled
Daniel Curtis

Daniel Curtis - Artist Statement:   
My work is driven by form. I fabricate and compose shapes, colours and surfaces until there is a charged relationship between them. Like characters in a play, I form structures to be in active conversation with one another, their dialogue held in a frozen tableaux. I make in response to the muddled memories of things I catch out of the corner of my eye – the end results are often strange resemblances of something half recognisable. The objects and forms relate to each other like groups of people standing around at an awkward after-work party: people that you think you recognise, seeming familiar, but you can’t quite put your finger on who they are, making you wonder if you know them at all.

What is this Place? (Detail, top)
Daniel Curtis

Untitled
Daniel Curtis