Since the 1970s, artists and filmmakers Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki have never ceased to break new paths and express their dissident positions, in hybrid, protean artworks abolishing the conventional boundaries between artistic media, cultures, and fields of knowledge. From the beginning, the artists have laid claim to a “double female authorship” proposing — in their Cinéma corporel — a “radical femininity” capable of “shattering all that weighs on it and constrains it”, beginning with the binary opposition of male and female. A concept further developed in their major cycles of works inspired by other “dissident bodies”: the Hermaphrodite (1982–90); the intersexual “Angel” (1985–2024); the conjoined twins (1995–2000). By revealing the power of these figures to transgress symbolic — as well as biological and anatomical — norms, Klonaris and Thomadaki have very early on contested the ideology of “nature” as a static order, thus anticipating current debates and theories concerning gender and the materiality of bodies. Today, at Bétonsalon, a decade after the passing of Maria Klonaris, Katerina Thomadaki revisits and extends the Cycle de l’Ange [The Angel Cycle], which the two artists launched in 1985 and developed together over three decades. This vast ensemble of artworks, created in a variety of media — photography, video, sound, text, performance, installation — begins with a medical photograph: an intersexual person associated by the artists with the angel — a herald announcing the collapse of gender. In their artworks, the intersexual body is not reduced to an object of observation, pathologized by the medical gaze. On the contrary, the artists assert its multifarious and elusive character as it becomes the subject of infinite metamorphoses through multiple hybridisations with astronomical photographs. Betonsalon’s exhibition space is specifically transformed to welcome this “Angel”, who meets and dialogs with emblematic self-portraits of the two artists. Via 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 a cosmic dimension, the two artists also express the genuine suffering experienced by the person stigmatised for their difference. This constantly reformulated image creates and maintains a certain tension between disaster and freedom, implosion and explosion, violence and emancipation. Borrowed from the soundtrack of their expanded cinema performance Mystère II : Incendie de l’Ange [Mystery II: The Angel Ablaze], the exhibition’s title insists on 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, human and non-human, the imaginary and the tangible. Ecstasy also evokes the altered state which Klonaris/Thomadaki’s artworks seek to elicit in the viewer; the abandonment of a day-time regime of perception, governed by functionality and rationality, in favour of a nocturnal plunge into a world both political and eminently poetic. This exhibition is part of a long-term research project supported by Bétonsalon with Maud Jacquin on Klonaris/Thomadaki’s œuvre, considered through the lens of performance and its relationship to gender and identity issues.