Eirini is interested in the affective experience of performance and the pleasures this experience may generate; she creates and writes on performances that use repetition as a structural and expressive means, also intrigued by the ways in which repetition influences our sense of experience.
Situated between performance and Live Art, Eirini's performance work deals with the problematics of human relationships, the memory of sexual encounters and the discomfort of being loved. It combines fictional and autobiographical narratives with coarse imagery in order to explore the solitude of desiring and the enigmatic nature of wanting. It uses repetition as a constitutive element of the fragmented stories it narrates: relentlessly repetitive movement and text function as a reminiscent of experiencing times of waiting, frustration and longing. The use of everyday objects in unusual, unpredictable ways attempts to re-stage the memory of intimate, sexual or otherwise, encounters in a playful, yet sinister manner. The work, which is about and from the body, voluptuously explores the thrill and wonder of eroticism, discovering, through the physicality of movement and the repetitive storytelling that, ultimately, what we want is to want.
Her last solo work 'Cock Tales and Ballads' is a parable of sexual despair, a story about human desire, which is never fulfilled, but always deepened in the encounter with ‘the other’. Alternating between crude detachment from oneself and fragile intimacy, 'Cock Tales and Ballads' touches ont the intricate theme of human dependence.
Eirini Kartsaki has presented performance work in the UK (291 Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, The Place, etc) and elsewhere (Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, Man-in-Fest Festival, Cluj-Napoca, Romania). 'Cock tales and ballads' has been presented in East End Collaborations, CPT and Arnolfini.
photo by Clarisse D' Arcimoles
