Prix d'honneur AWARE 2024 : Katerina Thomadaki, for her joint work with Maria Klonaris
Résumé
Since the late 1960s, the duo and couple formed by Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki have continually sought to invent a language of “liberty” within “the power-wrought language” that is art and representation. Confronting issues linked to masculine/feminine relations and to gender, to the body and to domination, the artists have simultaneously asserted their political engagement and their extreme formal precision, conscious that artistic forms themselves produce feminist statements. Abundant, their work is carried by the “dissident body”, which “does not conform to norms” nor to “the tyranny of normality […] exerted by the gaze”. Avant-garde and powerful, creator of breaches, their work has profoundly renewed experimental cinema and the visual arts, and has been duly recognised in France and abroad.