Fiercely independent, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki never stopped forging new paths and asserting their dissidence. Since the mid-1970s, they have built up a protean body of work in which cinema rubs shoulders with performance and photography and extends into immersive installations. In what they called Cinéma Corporel [Cinema of the Body], the body and identity become a site for aesthetic and political exploration. In their first films and performances of expanded cinema, they cast a reinvented gaze upon the female body and desire by producing images that subvert patriarchal imagination. By filming and photographing each other, the two artists created an unprecedented intercorporeality. Their joint signature, the signature of two women, is considered unique in cinema (Laura Mulvey, 2016).

From the early 1980s, Klonaris and Thomadaki began transgressing the limits of sexual identity by featuring non-normative bodies — “dissident” bodies as they called them — like that of the hermaphrodite or intersex “Angel”. By unleashing the symbolic power of these figures in installations and works that are themselves hybrid, the two artists gave shape to a radical and strikingly contemporary reflection on gender. Formally, their work is characterised by a critical refusal of boundaries between disciplines and an attraction to ephemeral forms: projections, transparencies, time-based media (film, sound) or temporialised photography, live performance (expanded cinema) and immersive installations and environments.

Today, Bétonsalon is teaming up with Katerina Thomadaki and independent curator Maud Jacquin, who has been accompanying the two artists’ work for several years. Together, they are developing a long-term research project on Klonaris/Thomadaki’s body of work considered through the prism of performance and its relationship to questions of gender and identity. Borrowed from Manifeste pour un cinéma corporel [Manifesto for a Cinema of the Body] written by Klonaris/Thomadaki in 1978, the title of this research underlines the assertion, through performance, of a rebellious subjectivity, capable of exploding frameworks – of both identity and artistic media — in a profusion of ever-transforming images eluding the fixity of categorisation.

Through exhibitions, publications and events organised at Bétonsalon and with partner institutions, we will look at the following different perspectives: filmed and photographed performance / the body as an “active screen”; performed cinema / the explosion of norms; performing the archive / the infinity of possibilities.

The key aim of this research is therefore to consider the relationships between cinema, photography, performance and gender in Klonaris/Thomadaki’s work and to highlight the singular contribution of both artists to performance theories and practices. Another major issue concerns the conservation and exhibition of their expanded cinema works that combine performative elements with the projection of films and slides, often accompanied by sound creations. The artists performed these technically complex works together in public. The death of Maria Klonaris in 2014 has made impossible the presentation of these works in their original form, thus emphasising the need to make them accessible again in updated formats.

To kick start this research, an exhibition around the duo’s The Angel Cycle will be shown at Bétonsalon, from 26th September to 14th December 2024. This series of works was inspired by a medical photograph of an intersex person, at once a sublime figure and a body suffering from its stigmatisation, which they explore and celebrate through an experience that brings together intersexuality and intermedia.