Bio:↘

Dimitris Gkikas (1984, GR) is a new media artist and designer. He has a background in graphic design, and he’s utilizing it as a means and a tool for working mainly on digital arts and video game projects. By blending self-created content with found materials from the internet (collage), he explores the themes of memory, solitude, and deadlocks. His small-scale, not extensive in time and space, playful work is often unfinished or looped, claiming the qualities of what willfully seems meaningless and trapped.

Statement↘

Dimitris Gkikas (Athens, 1984) is an artist and graphic designer working mainly in the fields of digital and web art. His practice explores themes of repetition as a mechanism of compulsion but also as a tool for gaining control, as well as mythology as a portal to an alternative reality and a narrative revealing a future that is occasionally apocalyptic. In his work, solitude turns into a safe space, while loneliness becomes a threat, both personally and collectively.

His work traces childhood, memory, the quotidian and the celestial, the traumatic and the comforting as axes to address the current moment, both psychosocially and politically. Engaging with repetition since he was a child through the vernacular structures imposed on him, he developed his own language, reflecting on the connotations and semantics of such behavior.

To what extent can a forced reiteration allow for a sense of security? Why is it often accompanied by misery or sadness, especially when related to the fear of failure or abandonment? His practice raises these questions with regard to agency, self-assurance, and the potential healing of what was once hurtful. Through his web-based projects, video games, and labyrinths standing in between a past reality, the present, and a longing for another future, Gkikas aims to find practices of inclusion, tenderness, and unconditional love. Cynicism, the release of turmoil, and the fearless representation of a dystopic framework are also embodied in his work in an effort neither to mystify nor demonize the dichotomies and contradictions under which many of us, as a human species, have grown up.

These intimate, often intimidating personal research subjects open up to a wider framework, speaking about muzzled archives and voices, suppressed feelings and behaviors, controlling and appropriative systems, and dismissed tensions and conflicts. Both the audience and human and non-human beings become protagonists in his work, operating, living, and surviving in places and conditions such as homes and prisons, environmental struggles, and dystopic terrains. And while they do so, they prompt us to think through a series of inquiries:

What can a post-apocalyptic world arising from a history written by those in power reveal about the consequences of the exploitation and occupation that the Earth has suffered for at least the past few decades? How can practices navigate us through the history of the Global South, the archives of colonialism, and the survival of political occupations, among many other subjects? How can these discourses open ways to speak about hierarchical systems, disordered syndromes, muzzled myths or realities? How can we form alternative, uncommon systems of care that support both the diseased and the caregivers, resisting the dichotomies a priori existing in support systems?

Gkikas’ practice touches on a non-existent, absent, or parallel reality as a space where contradictory feelings, suspended mental states, and other ways of living life prevail, undemonized by their semantic burden.