Nathalie Mba Bikoro

French-Gabonese artist Nathalie Bikoro inhabits a number of roles in her work - including that of live art performance artist, video-maker, writer, photographer, painter, sound composer, installation artist, opera scriptor - utilising the vocabulary of each art form to make works that function to create fractured narratives and blurs boundaries between the aesthetics. Her alternative live art performances are unique interpretations of worlds far from ordinary; she highlights, accentuates and magnifies elements of the relationships present with these spaces, exhibiting a precise form of empathy.
Her practice proposes a composition of sound, archaeology and digital interactive performance. Her philosophical approach stem from Pathos Formula theory, following Foucault-ian ideas on the laws of the body. Serving in re-adressing the certainty of the Hegelian telos; concerning how one creates a space for intensity and understands the form of Being and Time in the constraints of the Panoptic law.

The work deals with developing the intensity of an Event by way of reporting the traces she creates in installed spaces. The body anthropology and spatial environment are used as device for performing the multiplicity of the panoptic gaze. “ I wish to draw an architecture with the body. An arena where space and time converge, where the imaginary indicates a play of territorial crossings. The body and its conditions are the ephemeral skin and the surface to cover a platform of issues, narratives and possibilities in the contemporary post-modern world. I consider my works not as individual pieces but part of a whole Operatic Movement, a space of fractured theatricality and politics“.

“Crouching to view, Nathalie’s world transports us to a distinctly other place where veiled androgynous figures carry out subservient actions that could be on another planet where the images and soundtrack set up a cultural dialogue in the viewers’ mind as one dissembles the symbolism“. Review by Jane Pitt.