Maria Lalou

Maria Lalou
Μαρία Λάλου
Born	1977 Athens
Nationality	Greek
Education	Visual Arts, Interior Architecture & Design
Alma mater	Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Website	http://reaction-lalou.com

Maria Lalou (born in 1977) is a contemporary conceptual Greek artist focusing on the topic of view working in inter-discipline forms as extensions of architecture. She includes the viewer’s perspective in the completion of the works' significance, working in the spectrum Installation Art, Performance Art, Art Film and Art Publications. Her works negotiate about the notion of ‘viewing’ as an active presence, a durational status, a filmic tool, an exhibition motive, a performative act, a political statement and as a social recognition. From her early stage in the Arts, she started composing performance-installations within the content of pseudo-scientific environments. A significant tool in her work is that particular identity of the white coat. The way Lalou is using the visual perception of the audience is making her work political and critical to the forms and cultural norms.^[1] In her research on the topic of view she has been including her article written for Roehampton University^[2] peer reviewed magazine and her first artist's book publication [θέατρο] ^[3]in 2015. Being in the core of her instigations on the camera apparatus and its subjective role in society, her second book and art manifesto 'the camera' gets published at the end of 2019.^[4] In parallel, since 2012 she has an ongoing collaboration with the Danish architect Skafte Aymo-Boot, on their archival research in the un-finished concrete volumes of 'polykatoikia' in the city of Athens. The work is about concrete skeletons of Athens that engages the viewer in a process of looking into social, political and personal parts of the history of the city. Lalou and Aymo-Boot book Atlas of Athens' Incomplete Buildings-A Story of Hidden Antimonuments gets published in Spring 2021 by Jap Sam Books in The Netherlands.^[5] Since early 2004 Lalou is sharing her time between the two cities of Athens and Amsterdam.

Work[]

Lalou’s work is based on her on going research on the ‘mechanisms of the seen’ that started as an attempt to deconstruct ‘the political’ of the viewer. The research is focused on the role of the camera apparatus: its significance in the commons, its personification in the private, its appropriation in the surveillance of everyday networked reality and its potentiality as a weapon of truth in recording history. Lalou’s works formulate a precise frame, often a distilled, almost lab-like setting, integrating the performative act of viewing into the production of each work and treating it as a major signifier. Her presence within her works manifests as an operator of the ‘mechanisms of the seen’. Through a cross discipline methodology Lalou is often constructing large scale staged settings where independent professionals are under their own personal identity and social role, been aware that the material collected and the camera registration will be part of her on going archive on observations in the politics of viewing. Through the same principles and with herself on stage under the role of the operator she structured her first feature film filmed with the various types of cameras handled all by her invited guests as a silent movie of 144 min with title OPERATED, produced in Amsterdam. In 2018 she recorded her first feature film 'The Dialogue' during her 8 month working period in New York.^[6]

Biography[]

Maria Lalou is an artist born in Athens, Greece and a Fulbright Scholar.^[7] She is educated in Interior Architecture and Design from the Technological Educational Institute of Athens and in Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She was granted a research period in Copenhagen in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (former Denmarks Designskole) and followed and intense research in ‘theatre’ at the DasArts in Amsterdam. She has been a lecturer at Fine Arts and Architecture of Princeton University,^[8] Princeton; Architecture of ETH, Zurich; Aalto University of Helsinki, Finland, Rijksacademie Studios, Amsterdam Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy; and Università IUAV di Venezia, Venice, amongst others. She has contributed to the peer review journal activate, University of Roehampton , London, as well at Leonardo, MIT Press Journals.

Selected Exhibitions[]

Maria Lalou’s works have been presented internationally at Printed Matter, Inc,^[9] New York; ,^[10] Amsterdam; Onomatopee,^[11] Eindhoven; , Katowice, Poland; and Contemporary Art Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece; Motto,^[12] Berlin, Germany amongst others.

References[]