Born: 1976 Thessaloniki, Greece
Year of Migration to the UK: 1990
Biography
Artist, film-maker, educator, and researcher, Aikaterini Gegisian was born into a Greek-Armenian family in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1976. She immigrated to the UK in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Her art education began with a BA (Honours) in Critical Fine Art Practice from the University of Brighton, completed in 2001. She then pursued an MFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design, graduating in 2005. In 2012, she earned a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education from the University of Westminster. Finally, she completed her PhD in Art and Film by Practice at the University of Westminster (with a studentship from the Centre for Education and Research in Arts and Media) in 2014, with a dissertation titled Essay Film and Space.
Gegisian’s artistic practice is grounded in research with a methodological approach that dissects and reconstructs popular culture archives to analyse how images shape national and cultural identities. She also tackles themes of belonging, diaspora, displacement and collective memory by exploring the role of the media in influencing both our consciousness and unconsciousness. Her oeuvre includes video, photography, installation, and collage, employing a diverse array of audio-visual materials, from found imagery and location footage to both archival and popular films. Initially, Gegisian interrogated the image as a historical artifact, but her practice has evolved to an exploration of gender and identity, the relationship between sculpture and photography, and the photobook as a medium. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, she launched The Manipulator Vlog, a YouTube channel dedicated to her embracing the rural-agricultural thinking in life and work while visually incorporating teen magazines from her youth.
Gegisian exhibits widely. One of her most successful endeavours was her participation in the Armenian Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for best national display. Titled Armenity - a word derived from the French term Arménité (meaning the specific characteristics of grandchildren of the Armenian Genocide survivors) - the main themes of the exhibition were: displacement, territory, justice, reconciliation, ethos, and resilience. Between 2017 and 2019 she exhibited a series of works titled Turn Back Tide which looked into the financial legacy of the Tees Valley in northeast England in relation to notions of manufacturing and consumption, while linking the past and the present. The exhibition was part of a collaboration between Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) and the Castlegate Shopping Centre , Stockton-on-Tees. In 2020, she published a photobook titled Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, a collection of collages made from found photographs from western Europe and the USA, dating from the 1960s and 1970s. By collaging diverse imagery, ranging from pornographic magazines to National Geographic spreads, she challenged expected western capitalist views of body, nature, and pleasure. The content was organised around a mystical narrative where colours and sensations played major roles, with the idea of a ‘spontaneous other’ emerging from the story to establish a self outside of the paradigm of popular culture.
In addition to her art practice, Gegisian also has extensive teaching experience and received numerous awards for her work. She was visiting Lecturer in Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton in 2003. She then served as a Visiting Lecturer in Fine Art New Media at University College Chester from 2003 to 2004; Researcher and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster (2010-14). She advanced her career as a Research Lecturer and later a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Teesside University from 2015 to 2017. Gegisian’s research fellowships include as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, in 2014. She was the British Kluge Research Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA, from 2017 to 2018, and served as the International Fellow in Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria, from 2018 to 2019. She has also received awards from Nagoya University of Arts, Japan (2001) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Research Preparation Bursary (AHRC) in 2005. Aikaterini Gegisian currently lives and works between London and Greece, and she is represented by Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki. In the UK public domain her works are held in the collection of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
Related books
- Dennis Busch and Francesca Gavin, eds., Age of Collage 3, exh. cat. (Berlin: Gestalten Verlag, 2020)
- Aikaterini Gegisian, Handbook of the Spontaneous Other (London: MACK, 2020)
- Aikaterini Gegisian, 'The Suspended Real', Aperture Magazine, Vol. 241, 2020, pp. 96-101
- Aikaterini Gegisian, 'Build Memories', Memory Studies, Vol. 12, No. 5, 2019, pp. 579–581
- Aikaterini Gegisian, In Reverse (Istanbul: DEPO Publishing, 2017)
- Aikaterini Gegisian, A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas (Istanbul: Mas Matchaacilik, 2015)
- Malvian Shoair, ed., In Flux, exh. cat. (Athens: Elefsina Cultural Centre, 2015)
- Malvian Shoair, ed., In Flux, exh. cat. (Athens: Elefsina Cultural Centre, 2015)
- Maria Tsantsanoglou, ed., Heterotopias, exh. cat. (Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art Editions, 2007)
- Christos Savvidis, ed., Young Balkan Artists, exh. cat. (Thessaloniki: Hellenic Cultural Organisation, 2004)
Related organisations
- Chelsea College of Art (student )
- Higher Education Academy (associate member)
- Teesside University (lecturer)
- University College Chester (visiting lecturer )
- University of Brighton (student and visiting lecturer)
- University of Westminster (student and lecturer)
Related web links
- Aikaterini Gegisian and Miguel Amado in Conversation
- Armenity
- Artist Talk: Aikaterini Gegisian for Spike Island
- CV
- Dina Akhmadeeva, 'Beyond History: How does Armenia's Capital City Resolve its Soviet Past within its Capitalist Present?, New East Digital Archive, 14 September 2016
- Handbook of the Spontaneous Other
- Interview for Art Plugged
- Interview for Truth in Photography
- London Metropolitan University
- Official Page
Selected exhibitions
- Joy for Ever (group show), Whitworth, Manchester (2019)
- Punk Orientalism (group show), MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada (2018)
- 8th Brighton Photo Biennale, Brighton, England (2018)
- Turn Back Tide (solo exhibition), Castlegate Shopping Centre, Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham (2017)
- Power & Architecture (group show), Calvert 22 Foundation, London (2016)
- Shifting Geographies (solo exhibition), Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire (2016)
- (in)visible territories (solo exhibition), Kalfayan Galleries, Athens, Greece (2015)
- Armenity (group show), 56th Venice Biennale/Armenian National Pavilion, Venice, Italy (2015)
- Is this Why I Cannot Tell Lies? (group show), Tintype Gallery, London (2014)
- Diego Garcia (solo exhibition), Centre of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece (2011)
- The Sea, Dreams and Illusions (group show), 5th Gyumri International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Gyumri, Armenia (2006)
