Katerina Undo is an artist based in Athens, Greece. She studied at the Athens School of Law, Economics and Political Sciences (BA in Economics), the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (MA in Economics), the Athens School of Fine Arts, the LUCA School of Arts (Master of Arts) and the HISK/Higher Institute for Fine Arts (Laureate).
The hearing body (Master's thesis: The Notion of the Hearing Body Regarding the System Self-Others-World) has been a generous notion of Katerina’s interest, prolonging intensive research on how technologies and, ultimately, the capital that drives them, are progressively incorporated into the contemporary body: what we assumed was definitely ours is migrating to external interfaces. Research into prosthetic devices used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to enhance hearing or detect sound has shaped her work towards the enigmatic field of inner speech, while processes of transposing embodied perception - as intimate and disquietingly cohesive - have acquired an intensely social dimension in her artistic practice. In Katerina's work, there are more parts than wholes. The parts are unstable, fluid, vulnerable and dynamic. They are constituents of organisms, environments, networks, clusters, webs and swarms. They are atemporal and atopic, of nowhen and nowhere. They are subject to their own sympoietic processes. And, above all, they always already revolve around an alienating I that speaks in a place of being where localisation is non-localised and borders morph to incorporate other entities, existent and non-existent. Contrary to the stability of origin, there is no original or copy, no beginning, middle or end, but rather entanglements, convolutions and extensions. The context is such that each part, as an organ of technical life, is inextricably linked to all contingencies, alterations and mutations. It even becomes its own antibody, undermining its defences, unravelling its code, so that it constantly escapes representation, constantly shifts its sources of origin, away from the matrix, carries its voice from a single body into a cloud, into an elsewhere. The act of this symbiosis or contiguity of the self with the Other is, therefore, a quest to actively adopt radically changing conditions of co-existence or processes of becoming or to methodise the intention to confront oneself. From this perspective, the subject (which is always already at stake) seeks to open up to a thoroughgoing exteriority that entails its own undoing. Embracing both its condition and its impossibility, it dissolves, transforms, invades, and mutates in an evolutionary process towards the meta-stabilisation of the co-constitutive milieu of relations between bodies, technologies and environments. It is within this context of intertwined intrinsic-extrinsic relativism that in Katerina's work, primarily expressed through multimedia installations, the visitor's body often becomes an active site of transmutation.
Katerina's work has been exhibited in museums, institutions, biennials and festivals, including AIR-Taipei Culture Foundation (2014), HKW, Berlin (2014), Z33, Hasselt (2014), Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2014), C-mine, Genk (2015), Warande, Turnhout (2015), Le Bon Accueil, Rennes (2016), Le Bel Ordinaire, Pau, France (2017), Centrale for contemporary art, Brussels (2017), Bozar, Brussels (2018), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris (2019), Teatros del Canal, Madrid (2021), iMAL, Brussels (2021), Abdülmecid Efendi Mansion, Istanbul (2022).