Greek-born artists, filmmakers and theoreticians who have lived in Paris since 1975, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki have developed a multi-disciplinary body of work, rooted in theater and experimental cinema that constantly question and subvert the codes that weigh on bodies and their representations. Klonaris/Thomadaki’s work, a precursor to current debates on gender and the materiality of bodies, celebrates the power of what they call “dissident bodies”—bodies whose difference undermines normative systems and deconstructs the ideology of “nature” as a fixed order.

A decade after the passing of Maria Klonaris, Katerina Thomadaki revisits and extends The Angel Cycle, which originated in a medical photograph of an intersex person, whom they associate with the Angel, making them “the messenger of the collapse of gender boundaries”. In their works, the “Angel” cannot be reduced to an object of observation pathologized by the medical gaze, but asserts its multiple and elusive character. Through their interventions on this “matrix image”, Klonaris/Thomadaki give shape to the infinite possibilities which open up once we overcome the binary regime of sexual difference. But while the “Angel” thus acquires an emblematic dimension, the artists also express the suffering experienced by this real body, stigmatized because of its difference.

The title of the exhibition underlines the intensity of the relationship between the two artists and between them and this “Angel” who has long fascinated them. The reference to ecstasy highlights the way in which the amorous experience may overflow, undoing the limits between the self and the other—as well as between male and female, the imaginary and the tangible. Ecstasy also evokes the altered state of consciousness, the abandonment of a day-time regime of perception in favour of a nocturnal plunge into a world both political and eminently poetic.

An installation created by Katerina Thomadaki, dedicated to Maria Klonaris.
This project by artists Klonaris/Thomadaki has received the support of Fondation des Artistes