Iris Touliatou
Residency period
1 April – 1 July 2019
About
The artistic practice of Iris Touliatou (b. 1981, Greece) composes and decomposes concepts, narratives, objects, and bodies through subtle alchemical operations that probe the enigmatic nature of existence. By experimenting with an ever-growing array of materials and techniques, she seeks moments of slippages, instances of misalignments, chance meetings, and unexpected findings that are out of the experimenter’s control. Amongst her solo exhibitions are at Radio Athènes, Athens, Greece (upcoming, June 2019), Woman spinning at Palermo, Stuttgart, Germany (2019) and Some Seine, HYLE, Athens, Greece (2017). She has participated in international group exhibitions such as May the bridges I burn light the way, 5x5x5: Selected Projects, Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy (2018) and Expanded Ecologies, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece (2009).
Focus
Following her fascination for the unstable properties of matter and the ungraspable substance of the atmosphere, Iris Touliatou intends to pursue a research that goes under the provisional title of Animal Storms. The project approaches Singapore from “a climatic perspective,” it frames the weather as a metaphor of uncertainty, a form of language, and a space of collective resistance that allows us to talk about our futures, bodies, hopes, and fears. Through a combination of fieldwork and studio-based practice, the artist will mobilise diverse methodologies to expand the notion of air and water through physical, symbolic, imaginary, metaphorical associations as well as through states of movement. During the residency, the studio will become a laboratory to develop an open-ended body of works and activities, artistic interventions and temporary collective platforms that variously engage the irrational, the ambiguous, the performative, and the hallucinatory.