Eleni Bagaki
Eleni Bagaki is a contemporary artist and writer based in Athens. She explores autobiography and its relation to fiction through text, video, sound, painting, and sculpture. Informed by feminist theory, she explores how personal narrative can relate to the collective and the political. The places she has been to, and the unpredicted encounters with people, animals, plants, and feelings constitute the subjects of her ongoing investigation of time, space, belonging, womanhood, and the Self. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and art residencies internationally, including a residency at Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen, 2020), Fogo Island Arts (2019), Iaspis (Stockholm, 2018–19), Pivô (São Paulo, 2018), and Kantor Foundation (Krakow, 2017). In 2018 she received the NEON grant for artistic production, and in 2017 she won the Outset grant for her exhibition “A book, a film, and a soundtrack” at Radio Athènes, Αthens. She has exhibited at Signal (Malmö), New Studio (London), L’Inconnue (Montreal), Benaki Museum (Athens), Family Business (New Yοrk), and Palette Terre (Paris). She is currently represented by Eleni Koroneou gallery in Athens.
This series of digital collages has been inspired by the Minoan frescoes and their relation to nature. Minoans (the civilisation which resided on Crete and other Greek islands in the Bronze Age) were one of the earliest cultures to show their admiration of nature and paint natural landscapes often depicting animals, flowers, mountains, and fields. Taking as a starting point the current fragmented condition of the murals the artist has created collages with the subjects, featured on the original murals, their images replaced and matched with digital photographs of corresponding animals, plants, and bodies, that Bagaki has found on the internet. The "Internet findings" contribute to the creation of new reconstructions and meanings of the Minoan archeological fragments.
