Marianna Christofides

Marianna Christofides is an artist, filmmaker and researcher living and working in Berlin. Her artistic research deals with (largely unsung) narratives of rupture that mesh in the fabric of polyvocal places. What drives her practice is an ever-present urgency to remain attentive to disregarded undercurrents of political, environmental and biographical thrusts. Imprints of slow violence and neglected manifestations of precarity are negotiated in long-ranging, material engagements with the spaces under care.

She studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Athens, the Slade School of Fine Art, London and completed her MA at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. In 2011 she represented Cyprus at the 54th Venice Biennale in the exhibition Temporal Taxonomy. Selected grants and scholarships: Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme, E.ON Foundation – VISIT Fellowship, Federal State of Berlin, Institute for Foreign Relations (IfA), Academy of the Arts of the World Cologne, Hartware Kunstverein Media Artists' Prize, DAAD, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Onassis Foundation, and finalist for the Berlin Art Prize 2019. She has been an artist-in-residence at Villa Kamogawa, Kyoto; Tabakalera, San Sebastian; Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck; Light Cone, Paris; IASPIS, Stockholm; Villa Aurora, Los Angeles; Gasworks, London. Recent exhibitions, screenings, collaborations and lecture performances: [2022] Akademie der Künste Berlin; mumok, Vienna; [2021] bi'bak Kino, Berlin; Tabakalera, International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastian; [2020] Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp Memorial; VIS Journal, History Now; [2019] Display, Berlin (solo); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (solo); tanzhaus nrw, Düsseldorf (collaboration with A. Waierstall); Videonale.17 Bonn; Athens Conservatoire, Schwarz Foundation; [2018] Goethe-Institut Kyoto (round table discussion); Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen; [2017] Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka; GAK, Bremen; Temporary Gallery, Cologne (solo); Batroun Film Festival; waterside contemporary, London; [2016] Halle 14, Leipzig; [2015] Museo Riso, Palermo; 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art; Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade; [2014] CER Modern, Ankara; National Museum of Visual Arts, Sofia; [2013] Museum für Photographie, Braunschweig; DESTE Prize, Athens; [2012] BOZAR, Brussels; and Kunsthalle Bremen.

Marianna Christofides is participant of the Οnassis AiR Emergency Fellowships 2019-20 and of the Tailor-made Fellowships program 2022-23.

“How can one grasp and express the instability and fragility of our times?” Driven by a question doomed to remain largely unanswered Marianna Christofides will travel to Japan to continue her research leading to a future multi-part 16mm film installation. Under the working title 'Strung to Breaking Point' she investigates terrestrial force as a trigger for human energy. A country ceaselessly afflicted by disasters facilitates entry points to reflect on notions of uncertainty, precarity, agency and slow violence; on existential conditions that affect us all irrespective of geographies. In order to re-think the notion of energy it attends to a planetary awareness in seeing life as a systemic phenomenon.