PERFORMANCE:Filippos Tsitsopoulos-To sing in the fragile boat of our existence/ Fake slaves

Filippos Tsitsopoulos is a performance artist who draws from theater and painting and documents his performances through his videos. Performance is a late twentieth century medium, an artistic practice that does not yet have a clear sign and always concerns the limits, either the limits of truth as Marina Abramovic claimed or the limits of lies, as William Shakespeare contended. There, in the space between painting and theater, Tsitsopoulos situates his work in which the main medium is himself and his several faces or masks, authentic and constructed, real and fictional. The self is a complex web of relations generated from the institutional power structures which we inhabit. The I is someone else as Arthur Rimbaud once said that we fancy observing from a certain distance, critically and with irony. This is what Tsitsopoulos seems to be doing, paying heed to art history at the same time and recalling James Ensor, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Jose de Ribera among others. Tsitsopoulos uses masks from live and organic matter, vegetables and dead fish shopped from the market, lending them their voice and communicating the pain of their loss. In the action To Sing in the Fragile Boat of Our Existence, Athens 2019 as in the rest of his performances, Tsitsopoulos departs from literary texts, from Sara Kane, William Shakespeare, Thomas Bernhard, Oscar Wilde, Peter Handke, simulating the theatrical condition and establishing with these texts a relation permeated with interpretive violence, respect, appreciation and love.

CV Filippos Tsitsopoulos is based in Madrid and London, his work draws on theatre, painting and performance art and examines the relationships between them through video, live action, voice and body language. Using extraordinary and elaborately constructed masks as a form of protection, disguise, performance, or just plain entertainment, Filippos’s work involves an exploration of authentic identity versus performed identity. He considers the often polarized fragmented identities that we perform and how to bring the interiorized authentic self and the exterior constructed self together. His goal is to examine socially constructed patterns of behavior, create situations in which the participants break or transcend the internal feedback loops that control their own actions, and address the power structures we inhabit and perpetrate. His last body of work Is art lonely? is the result of various performances, interviews, drawings, texts and exhibitions that took place in venues including Tate Modern, Serpentine Gallery, Wallace Collection and FACT. http://www.hetvlot-oostende.be, www.thisisliveart.co.uks, https://hull.stage.mnatwork.com, https://filippostsitsopoulos.com

 

Filippos Tsitsopoulos, To sing(k) 2019, To sing in the fragile boat of our existence/ Fake slaves, © & Courtesy Filippos Tsitsopoulos