Dimitra Bouritsa
Themed Residency: She, Ruins, Everything + Self-Directed Residency
Dimitra Bouritsa (1988, GR) is an artist and an educator. Her practice draws on the themes of womanhood as a metaphor for speaking about origins, life, established patterns between humans, communal systems, nature, fundamental emotions and existence paths.
In her work, what’s considered as motherly becomes a means for tracing what it takes to grow with one another. Animalistic schemes act as portals for entering the otherness embedded in ourselves, occasionally leading us back to primitive human societies informed by our reciprocal relationship with nature, our co-existence with the non-human. In her practice, the mask feels like a facade that can both reveal, yet also hide, erase, muzzle.
How can the medium of painting, when used as a gestural or performative gesture, mouth power dynamics, de-establish hierarchy systems or oppressive conducts? How can we use the microenvironment of a family as a way to renegotiate the fixed stereotypical image of a woman and its position and rights in the world?
These are some of the questions raised in Bouritsa’s works, which are enacted through metaphysical and allegorical motifs and species inspired by folk tales and cultural traditions.
