Maria Paschalidou (c) 2006


In my artwork I employ photography, digital imaging, digital video, and interactive multimedia. Using these media either on their own or combined, I produce photographic series, digital videos and interactive CD-ROMs, which in many cases make up installations and interactive environments. Far from being a documentary practitioner, I find myself in the position of the image maker and visual story teller. My artwork explores issues of power and control. Of particular concern is the institutionalization of daily life, the changes brought to our perception of space and time by globalization and social mobility, the new definitions of Self brought into light by social mobility and migration, the contemporary conceptualizations of the body as the field of both socio-political and emotional conflict, the power agents that mediate in the construction of identity and the systematic production of Otherness. Practices of digital technology play important role in my photographic and video compositions. By juxtaposing photography and digital imaging, I wish to challenge the documentary aura of photography, to critique the idea of realism and suggest that a photograph is indeed "a window onto the world"; yet this world is of multiple possibilities and realities. Thus, against the ideology of the "candid" and mirror - image pictures that dominates the 'post-photographic' era, I array the dynamics of the photographic medium to produce visual metaphors for 'reality', which mainly question, critique, comment, rearrange and/or reconstruct it. Believing that photography is not an objective recording medium, I wish to challenge its boundaries. I construct ephemeral environments into my studio using everyday materials, mostly small scale objects, that I blow them up through close-ups to convey a sense of an ambiguous, fictitiously 'real' environment with its own connotations and metaphors. The materials selected for each one of my series invoke specific connotations and meanings, functioning as the models for the visual metaphors. Fiction is always in the core of my artwork; most of my works - either being photographs, videos or interactive pieces - incorporate fictitious elements by means of multiple digital interventions, manipulations and transformations. Fiction is the tool with which I develop my concepts and my view of reality as a performative and transformative process always understood in fragments, pieces and tendencies. Fiction constitutes the library of my various translations of 'reality'; contains my artist's perceptions of history, culture, memory, geography, mobility and interruption. Beauty is also a structural component of my artwork. I incorporate fictitious elements and metaphors to comment on the 'ugliness' systematically produced around us by great powers and manipulators while at the same time I highly aesthetise my images. This element of beauty in my imagery serves different purposes: It reflects both my uncertainty towards reality and the rationalization of this 'ugliness'; it serves as a commentary on our seduction by the miseries this ugliness brings to us, or, even better, as a commentary on our addiction to these miseries; But, most important of all, it brings ambiguity and uncertainty into the imagery, leaving it open to further interpretations.

In my artwork I employ photography, digital imaging, digital video, and interactive multimedia. Using these media either on their own or combined, I produce photographic series, digital videos and interactive CD-ROMs, which in many cases make up installations and interactive environments.

Far from being a documentary practitioner, I find myself in the position of the image maker and visual story teller. My artwork explores issues of power and control. Of particular concern is the institutionalization of daily life, the changes brought to our perception of space and time by globalization and social mobility, the new definitions of Self brought into light by social mobility and migration, the contemporary conceptualizations of the body as the field of both socio-political and emotional conflict, the power agents that mediate in the construction of identity and the systematic production of Otherness.

Practices of digital technology play important role in my photographic and video compositions.

By juxtaposing photography and digital imaging, I wish to challenge the documentary aura of photography, to critique the idea of realism and suggest that a photograph is indeed "a window onto the world"; yet this world is of multiple possibilities and realities. Thus, against the ideology of the "candid" and mirror - image pictures that dominates the 'post-photographic' era, I array the dynamics of the photographic medium to produce visual metaphors for 'reality', which mainly question, critique, comment, rearrange and/or reconstruct it.

Believing that photography is not an objective recording medium, I wish to challenge its boundaries. I construct ephemeral environments into my studio using everyday materials, mostly small scale objects, that I blow them up through close-ups to convey a sense of an ambiguous, fictitiously 'real' environment with its own connotations and metaphors. The materials selected for each one of my series invoke specific connotations and meanings, functioning as the models for the visual metaphors.

Fiction is always in the core of my artwork; most of my works - either being photographs, videos or interactive pieces - incorporate fictitious elements by means of multiple digital interventions, manipulations and transformations. Fiction is the tool with which I develop my concepts and my view of reality as a performative and transformative process always understood in fragments, pieces and tendencies. Fiction constitutes the library of my various translations of 'reality'; contains my artist's perceptions of history, culture, memory, geography, mobility and interruption.

Beauty is also a structural component of my artwork. I incorporate fictitious elements and metaphors to comment on the 'ugliness' systematically produced around us by great powers and manipulators while at the same time I highly aesthetise my images. This element of beauty in my imagery serves different purposes: It reflects both my uncertainty towards reality and the rationalization of this 'ugliness'; it serves as a commentary on our seduction by the miseries this ugliness brings to us, or, even better, as a commentary on our addiction to these miseries; But, most important of all, it brings ambiguity and uncertainty into the imagery, leaving it open to further interpretations.