Leading figures of the French experimental film scene, Maria Klonaris
and Katerina Thomadaki have initiated the cinema of the body at the end
of the seventies and have introduced an innovative approach to expanded
cinema and projection environments. Working since the mid-seventies on
the hybridations of media, they have gained international recognition
through their films, videos, photographs and multi-media installations.
As theorists, they have published numerous essays, manifestos and books,
which constitute a vast theoretical body of work parallel to their
audio-visual creation. In the nineties, Klonaris and Thomadaki have
conceived and directed in Paris three editions of the quadriennal
Rencontres Internationales Art cinéma / vidéo / ordinateur, a pioneering
international event dedicated to the moving image and to technological
innovations in art.

After The Angel Cycle (1985-2000), featuring the constant
transformations of a medical photograph of a hermaphrodite, which they
install in site specific environments, Klonaris and Thomadaki inaugurate
a new cycle of works with Sublime Disasters. Here the starting point is
a found photograph of a wax figure: two children, conjoint twins, "a
double phenomenon with a unique trunk", from the famous anatomical
collection of the Spitzner Museum, which opened in Paris in 1856. The
artists associate this extraordinary body with marine organisms,
photographs of shells and etchings extracted from the Artistic Forms of
Nature (1899) by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. The conjoint twins are
thus immersed in a network of sea constellations.

This exhibition is a new stage of Klonaris' and Thomadaki's reflexion on
the "dissident body" and the technological doubles. A key figure of the
contemporary crisis of identity and normality, the "monster" is both a
virtual and a real body. Here the double "monster" goes through the
successive simulacra of human invention - from the wax portrait to the
technological mirrors of photography and digital processing.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Gilbert
Lascault, Christian Gattinoni, Anguéliki Garidis, Maria
Klonaris/Katerina Thomadaki and an interview of the artists by Jacques
Donguy (Editions A.S.T.A.R.T.I., Paris, 2000).

Artists' site Klonaris/Thomadaki: a cyber retrospective 1975-2000

http://mkangel.cjb.net
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/astarti

e.mail: klon.thom.astar@wanadoo.fr

Klonaris/Thomadaki will present their site on Friday 24th March at
8.30pm during the Internet Festival at the Web Bar, 32 rue de Picardie,
75003 Paris