Lito Kattou

LANDS/SexLife

cur. Ioanna Gerakidi

Opbo studio, Piraeus

30 June April 2023 — 27 July 2023


For her solo exhibition LANDS/SexLife and through a new body of work, Kattou ponders and expands on the characteristics and symbolisms of the mantis as a species encountering life through survival, sex through shielding, resistance through cannibalism. By exposing a series of reliefs tracing the circularity of time as an a-chronical structure, the fatality appended on the femme identity as a parable for protecting life and the landscape as a means for altering the dominant geopolitical narratives, Kattou’s new body of work aims to utter, write or compile the intangible documents required for making a cartography of the otherworldly, the uncanny, the infinite.

In this series of works, the relief, a word coming from the Latin verb relevo, meaning to raise, acts as a repetitive, yet not identical scheme, which when touched as mantra enlivens our potential to exist in an omniversal world. And it’s precisely through this activation of a parallel current that we, audiences, are led to the unknown, to the seductive qualities of what has never been encountered before, erotically and otherwise. In one of her recent interviews, Tina Campt writes about what it takes to “think things together, synaesthetically”; she invites us to listen to the sound of paintings, look at the scenes of sonic pieces, touch the smell of the bodies occupying the space. This multilayered activation of being and interacting with our surroundings is what LANDS/SexLife is suggesting.

And along with the works navigating us through a linear, yet mythical narrative, acting not only as gestural promises, but as agents carrying the mantises’ psyches, there’s a human presence, even in its absence. Lethargic bodies, enchanted by the spells, the whispering voices of mantises, are experiencing the pleasure of being static, of occupying a revealing inertia. Their structured lives, schedules, postures have dissolved; the magnetic qualities of a capsule pausing all of the world’s accelerations has stimulated another kind of alienation. One, that allows a withdrawal from a violent, canonical, systemic attachment. Their performative gestures only last for a few hours; yet the traces of their metamorphosis will always be present in the space, blessing the depths of dissonance.

LANDS/SexLife longs to be lived as an ethereal inquiry, asking the questions: What does it take to reframe the habitual orbits in order to find other types of the celestial? How can we look at and with the unearthly and the numinous, not as intimidating schemes but as seductive acts divulging other desires, sexes, successes and safe spaces?



Ioanna Gerakidi


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photos: Stathis Mamalakis