KLONARIS/THOMADAKI

Following the series “De l’extase au ravissement,” (“From Extasy to Rapture”) on Spanish experimental film, and the Barbara Hammer and Yvonne Rainer retrospectives, the Jeu de Paume is pursuing its tributes to independent filmmakers with the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of the two Paris-based Greek artists, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki. Two years after Maria Klonaris’ sudden passing, this programme revisits forty years of their collaborative practice with the aim to cast fresh light on their singular artistic approach which crosses experimental film, performance and installation. The presentation of their multi-faceted work will include single-screen films, expanded cinema works, slides, sound pieces as well as thematic discussions. Animated by the constant creative presence of Katerina Thomadaki, this retrospective is dedicated to Maria Klonaris.

Rebellion is at the core of Klonaris and Thomadaki’s art. Whereas, in the 1970s, the experimental film scene was dominated by a formal, often non-figurative approach, these two major figures of the cinematic avant-garde practised and theorised what they called the Cinema of the Body, focusing on the female body and identity as a site of visual and political exploration. In their hands, cinema became a powerful tool for subverting the Western patriarchal imaginary, and destabilising norms governing the body and its representation.

In their first films and expanded cinema works¹, the reinvention of the body and female desire is conveyed through self-representation and the visualisation of the unconscious by means of a language of mysterious rituals. Together uncodified and deeply rooted in a trans-cultural imaginary, these rituals call upon Ancient Greece and Egypt, but also Oriental, African and Native American cultures. From the mid-80s onwards, Klonaris and Thomadaki transgressed the limits of sexual identity by representing non-normative bodies – calling them “dissident bodies” – such as the hermaphrodite or their intersexual Angel. By deploying the symbolic power of these figures in installations and multimedia works, which were themselves hybrid and in constant transformation, the artists gave form to a radical and pioneering reflection on gender and transsexuality.

For Klonaris/Thomadaki, no subversion of the dominant symbolic systems can come without radically questioning the conventional uses of the cinematic medium. To this end, they reconfigured relations between filmer and filmed, reinvented cinema as a corporeal experience embracing all the senses (and not just sight), intermixed all artistic forms and extended the image beyond the frame of the screen. Whereas commercial cinema assigns the viewer to a predefined place, the two artists’ non-narrative films call for an entirely different kind of engagement, inviting viewers to be transformed by the near-hypnotic power of their images.

Their cinema is also about the ethics of relation. Created by a “woman double author,” it owes both its conceptual foundation and structure to the exploration of the interaction between two subjectivities, to the “secret dialogue” (to quote the title of one of their films) between two bodies and two imaginations — a dialogue which transforms film into an “intercorporeal” space. From there arises one of the questions that informs the whole of Klonaris/Thomadaki’s work: how to break away from binary systems and open up intermediate territories between the self and the other, but also between reality and imaginary, body and mental universe, masculine and feminine, western and non-western cultures, microcosm and macrocosm.

Situated at the crossroads of experimental cinema, the performing and the visual arts, Klonaris/Thomadaki’s oeuvre pioneered and influenced some of the major tendencies that were to transform these different artistic practices: the renewed emphasis on the body in the viewer’s experience, the omnipresence of the moving image in the gallery space, the interdisciplinarity and hybridisation of media, to name but a few. By combining the presentation of their films, performances and installations with events and debates, this retrospective aims to emphasise the important artistic and theoretical contribution of these two artists, and to shed new light on the multiple facets of a body of work that is at once poetic and definitely political.
Maud Jacquin
Translated from French.

1. The concept of “expanded cinema” was developed in the 1960s to embrace practices renewing or “extending” the experience of projection – for example, through performative elements or multiple screens.

The retrospective will alternate screenings and discussions, as in the artists’ life-long tradition of dialogues. Selected guests include: Laura Mulvey, film theorist; Marie-José Mondzain, philosopher; Miranda Terzopoulou, anthropologist; Marina Grzinic, philosopher and artist; and Cécile Chich, independent researcher.
The sessions will be presented by either Katerina Thomadaki or Maud Jacquin.

BIOGRAPHY

Filmmakers, artists and theorists of Greek origin based in Paris since 1975, Klonaris and Thomadaki are the co-authors of a multidisciplinary work, which includes over a hundred films organised in cycles — The Body Tetralogy (1975–79), The Cycle of the Unheimlich (1977–82), Portrait Series (1979–92), The Cycle of Hermaphrodites (1982–90), Electra’s Dream (1983–90), The Angel Cycle (1985), Sublime-Disasters: the Twins— as well as numerous publications.
Their work has gained international recognition (MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Cinémathèque Française; British Film Institute, London; Kunsthalle, Wien and many more) and is widely researched. As cultural activists, Klonaris/Thomadaki organised in the 1990s the Rencontres Internationales Art Cinéma/Vidéo/Ordinateur over three seasons, and co-edited the books Technologies et imaginaires (Dis/voir), Mutations de l’image and Pour une écologie des medias (A.S.T.A.R.T.I.). Their films are being restored by the French National Film Archives/CNC, whilst their texts and audiovisual documents are part of the National Library of France (BnF Klonaris/Thomadaki Funds) and their radio pieces are preserved at the Audiovisual National Institute (INA).

www.klonaris-thomadaki.net

PROGRAMMING: Katerina Thomadaki and Maud Jacquin

The “KLONARIS/THOMADAKI” retrospective is organised in collaboration with the Film Heritage Department of the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with the help of the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir.

Admission: 3 euros per session/free for members or upon presentation of a same day ticket.
Information: infoauditorium@jeudepaume.org