Eleni Kamma

Biography

Eleni Kamma (Athens, 1973) lives and works in Brussels and Maastricht. Her practice moves along a Moebius strip schema, that keeps circulating from her as individual artist (through drawings and objects), to dialectic collaborations (films, performative events, a journal) and back again Kamma searches for media and forms that help her overcome a hesitation of speaking in the first person within a national-cultural framework. Since 2009, she has been based in both Maastricht and Brussels. She holds two nationalities, Greek and Cypriot. Due to her father’s refugee status in Greece and to the occupation of the northern part of Cyprus where her family originates, she constantly experiences the feeling of ‘not properly belonging’ from an early age. This has led her to consider herself as a pároikos — someone living close to others as a temporary dweller — leaving her with questions of how to raise one’s voice in relation to one’s identity. Whom and how to address? Kamma’s projects are characterized by long periods of research. Her practice is informed by the inherent gaps, blind spots and contradictions within existing cultural narratives and structures. These involve issues of memory, authenticity and identity, often in the context of an increasingly paradoxical Europe. By revisiting systems of classification and strategies of description, she examines the relation of the cliché, the banal and the stereotype to the formation of history and the production of meaning. Since 2014, Kamma is part of the artist run organization Jubilee – Platform for artistic research and production. With Jubilee, she co-develops the cooperative research project Caveat in relation to her current research project Casting Call.