Katerina Undo is an artist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
Katerina 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). She is currently a (joint) PhD candidate at the University of Leuven (Belgium), the LUCA School of Arts (Belgium) and the University of Melbourne (Australia).
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 otherness. 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 every part, as an organ of technical life, and every whole, as a body without organs, is inextricably linked to all contingencies, alterations and mutations. It even becomes its own antibody, undermining its defences, re(de)ciphering 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 process of symbiosis or contiguity of the self with the Other is therefore a search for actively adopting radically changing conditions of co-existence or processes of becoming or methodising 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 these processes of interwoven intrinsic-extrinsic counter-transitions that the body often becomes an active site of transmutation in Katerina's work, expressed primarily through multimedia installations. And it is within this notion of becoming an active site of transmutation that Katerina's current PhD research weaves an experiential futuring approach as a co-creative methodology to help citizens respond to IT outage in (un)livable climates.
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).