Maria Lalou is a contemporary conceptual Greek artist focusing on the topic of view working in inter-discipline forms as extensions of architecture. She includes the viewer’s perspective in the completion of the works' significance, working in the spectrum Installation Art, Performance Art, Art Film and Art Publications. Her works negotiate about the notion of ‘viewing’ as an active presence, a durational status, a filmic tool, an exhibition motive, a performative act, a political statement and as a social recognition. From her early stage in the Arts, she started composing performance-installations within the content of pseudo-scientific environments. A significant tool in her work is that particular identity of the white coat. The way Lalou is using the visual perception of the audience is making her work political and critical to the forms and cultural norms. In her research on the topic of view she has been including her article written for Roehampton Universitypeer reviewed magazine and her first artist's book publication in 2015. Being in the core of her instigations on the camera apparatus and it's subjective role in society, her second book and art manifesto 'the camera' gets published at the end of 2019. In parallel, since 2012 she has an ongoing collaboration with the Danish architect Skafte Aymo-Boot, on their archival research in the un-finished concrete volumes of 'polykatoikia' in the city of Athens. The work is about concrete skeletons of Athens that engages the viewer in a process of looking into social, political and personal parts of the history of the city. Since early 2004 Lalou is sharing her time between the two cities of Athens and Amsterdam.
Work
Lalou’s work is based on her on going research on the ‘mechanisms of the seen’ that started as an attempt to deconstruct ‘the political’ of the viewer. The research is focused on the role of the camera apparatus: its significance in the commons, its personification in the private, its appropriation in the surveillance of everyday networked reality and its potentiality as a weapon of truth in recording history. Lalou’s works formulate a precise frame, often a distilled, almost lab-like setting, integrating the performative act of viewing into the production of each work and treating it as a major signifier. Her presence within her works manifests as an operator of the ‘mechanisms of the seen’. Through a cross discipline methodology Lalou is often constructing large scale staged settings where independent professionals are under their own personal identity and social role, been aware that the material collected and the camera registration will be part of her on going archive on observations in the politics of viewing. Through the same principles and with herself on stage under the role of the operator she structured her first feature film filmed with the various types of cameras handled all by her invited guests as a silent movie of 144 min with title OPERATED, produced in Amsterdam. In 2018 she recorded her first feature film 'The Dialogue' during her 8 month working period in New York.
