Projects
Since 2011, Christina Elias has carried out several artistic projects, solo and relational, in museums, galleries and cultural centers in Brazil, where she currently lives, and in Europe, where she lived, studied and worked for 14 years between Berlin, Lisbon, London and Rome . In all of them, performance expands to other means as process and poetics: canvases, drawings, photography, video, installation, textile objects, clothes and fashion accessories are an expansion of her practice and discourse on the body.
Music Box
Performance, 2018-2023.
Duration: 45 min
In Music Box (performance), Christina Elias writes a diary in real time with charcoal, on a large canvas. With each page that ends, she blurs the text with the movement of her body, in a process that is repeated successively. In this work, two layers of expression are explored: one, the woman who offers the observer what he is used to receiving – the objectified exposure of a woman inside a box; and, in another, the creation of an intimate, safe and protected space, where words acquire physicality through the silent movement of the body.
Objects of everyday life
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Video performance (animation/pixilation), 2018
Duration: 8 min
Every hour of the day has its own feeling... Combining movement, text and photography (pixilation), this work aims to portray the almost hypnotic repetition of sensations and feelings that assault a person throughout the 12 hours of the day. Pixalation is an animation technique where numerous images are filmed and then projected in sequence, creating an illusion of movement.
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Absent body or At night I cry
Performance, 2021
with César Meneghetti (live video)
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CLAREIRA MAC-USP 2021 Project
In Absent body or At night I cry, technology is associated with the body through the use of media such as video, real time cinema, among others, and is incorporated into this performance in an experiment with the limits of the individual body, the physical body and, consequently, with the possibilities and potentialities of presence .
Remains of myself
Residual objects from the performances Music Box2018-2023
Charcoal on canvas
300 x 200cm
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The double layer ofMusic Box also reveals itself in the formal aspect of this work, so that the performance results in two “objects” of exposure: one is the action of writing and blurring the text with one's own body and, the other, the charcoal canvas that results from this same action
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Clock
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Residual object from the video performance Objects of everyday life, 2018
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Photographic print in acrylic on canvas written in charcoal.
Wool binding.
20 x 20cm
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Contour
Residual performance objectAbsent body: at night I cry, 2021
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Dry pastel onvegetal paper
100 x 250 cm
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Makeup
Performance, 2023
duration: 20 min
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“The act of making small changes to something to make its appearance more attractive. The act of disguising something.” In MAKE UP, visual artist and performer Christina Elias paints a canvas with eyeliner, lipstick and blush, moving this ritual performed daily by women in their homes to the political territory of the female body.
By a thread
Performance, 2022
duration: 20 min
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InBy a thread, the line of writing turns into knitting. Fingers into needles. The body is a platform for bonds to occur. Knots are tied to successive other knots forming a visceral braid that gives birth to obscured narratives of women. Words are stitched to words in a collective process of creating discourse.
Makeup
Residual object of the performance MAKE UP, 2023
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Lipstick, eyeliner, blush on canvas
160 x 300cm
Bag n. two
Residual object of performance By a thread, 2023
Tulle, finger knitting and pins
122 x 40 x 22 cm
Drawing an ironic parallel between the woman’s body and consumable objects, “Bolsa n. 2” explores the presence of opposing feelings – such as pain and pleasure, love and violence – in the female universe. Residual object of the performance “By a thread” held in the Historic Center of São Paulo in 2022, the “internal” of this work was created through a knitting technique in which the fingers replace the needles in the weaving. This material was wrapped in tulle and shaped by pins that, in the artist's research, represent the provisionality of the body, matter, performance and, in a broader perspective, life.
Carmen
Video performance, 2020
duration: 8 min
MARP COLLECTION
Addressing three current themes, the pandemic, migration and, as a result of these, the conflict between collective good and individual good – Christina Elias tells in images, text and movement the story of her great-grandmother Carmen who, as a newborn, embarked on a immigrant ship from Granada (Spain) to Brazil. It was Spanish flu season and, in the Atlantic, Carmen had a fever. Her mother, who would have had to throw her overboard, hid with her in the ship's hold throughout the journey. Upon arriving on Brazilian soil, Carmen was registered under a name different from hers. She lost his original name, but gained the chance to start over.
Carmen's Stories
Residual objects from the video performanceCarmen,2020
Pastel and graphite on vegetal paper
42 x 59cm
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To create the video performance Carmen, Christina Elias wrote Carmen's story in chalk pastels on 12 sheets of tracing paper, which she then released into the sea. Metaphorically, one disconnects from the tangible work of art (the object) to incorporate it in another way: through the SKIN. Just like in butoh training, the story is “killed”, the body and the object are “killed”, to give them a possibility of development different from that which was in progress. Sinking in the water as an inevitable “suspension” that can mean a deviation of meaning. After the performance, 7 of these stories on paper were rescued, dried and varnished. Six of them were donated to the MARP collection.
Infinite performance
Video performance, 2019.
Duration: 8 min
Walking on a floor of dried flowers. Without wanting to get to a specific place or produce something. Walking as a concept trigger. Video performance inspired by the poem “Walking Meditation” by Thich Nath Hahn.
Every woman
Video performance, 2020
duration: 8 min
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Problematizing themes such as gender, identity and society, this work places the woman's body in a place where opposites try to coexist: an individual body and a political/collective body; the right to the visibility of the naked body and the danger of exploiting that same nudity; a body that inserts itself into a reality already written by social, cultural, family traditions... and a body that seeks, in and on those same words, to weave its own text.
One-Minute Diaries:
performances a woman's everyday life
In this series of mini video performances, the written or spoken text functions as a soundtrack for the visual narrative, seeking to concentrate on audiovisual works of approx. one minute, several pages of a diary, several days of a life. This is a woman, who is “boxed” in a closed system, looking for loopholes in that same system to undermine it through the use of her own structures. It is also a critique of the demands of a consumer society in which everything must be reproducible, marketable, capable of appropriation and, above all, function as an economic good. The one-minute diary reproduces the conception of time in capitalism that suggests consuming as many items as possible within a limited space of time: quick, express consumption. One minute. Five works of this series have been created. In 2023, Christina Elias was awarded PROAC 05/2023 for the production of new performances and is creating five new videos in this series.
Infinite performance
Infinite Performance residual object, 2019.
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photography, fine art print, mineral pigment on Hahnemülle paper
93 x 123 cm
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Every woman
Residual object from the video performance Every woman, 2020
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Graphite on vegetal paper
100 x 200 cm
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Skin
Video performance, HD, 2019
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Duration: 20 min
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MAC-USP Collection
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The skin as a film that, at the same time, separates and connects the body and the environment. What is the self? A finished unit, molded into a shape that excludes everything outside the boundaries of the epidermis? Or a continuous process of exchanges and inter-contamination between inside and outside, between individual and environment?
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I don't forget that I forgot
Video performance, 2020
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inspired by the short story “The woman who killed the fish” by Clarice Lispector
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FUNARTE Respirarte Award 2020
duration: 16 min
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In the video performance "I don't forget that I forgot" (2020), Christina Elias reinterprets in different languages - performance, dance, image, spoken and written text - the short story The woman who killed the fish (1968) by Clarice Lispector. In this (supposedly children's) text, Clarice makes public the internal world of a woman who, forgetting to feed the fish entrusted to her, ends up “accidentally” killing them. Forgiveness and guilt, love and violence are themes that permeate Clarice's text and that make up the ground on which Christina transmutes words into gestures.
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HERE & THERE [or Somewhere InBetween]
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Video performance, installation, 2011
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duration: 20 min
with: Anca Huma (performance), Virgis Puodziunas (video), Annisa Jabour (scenography)
Here and There [or Somewhere Inbetween] began with a series of interviews with immigrant women. Despite the diversity of socio-cultural contexts and geographical origins of each of them, a similar basic structure was seen in each of their paths: the inevitability of the “journey” and the enclosure in one’s own body as protection against others and the outside world. The result was a mosaic of seven story fragments that together make sense as a whole. The main question that arises in this work is how to performatively approach the place where the different feminines meet.
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Life in pink
Photoperformance, 2023.
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Life in Pink rescues the physical and metaphorical language of classical Ballet stored in the artist's body during long years of training to pose a series of questions and reflections on behavioral patterns, mainly related to gender, that go far beyond dance techniques: A angel woman, light, fragile, abstract and floating far from the ground.
Phonetic fragments of one (Self)
Audiovisual and movement performance, 2014
With: Corposignalizing (performance), César Meneghetti (video), Yuko Matsuyama and Leigh Thomas (music)
FUNARTE WOMEN IN THE VISUAL ARTS AWARD 2013
Phonetic Fragments of one (Self) is a performance and audiovisual installation, which addresses the limits of communication through translations and re-translations of Clarice Lispector's novel, "A Paixão Segundo G.H.". Fragments of text in Portuguese, Italian, English and German make up a soundscape that during the live event is “re-translated” by deaf performers into a silent lexicon of movement, by a video artist into images and by a sound artist into abstract sounds. The creative process of "Phonetic Fragments of a (Si)" starts from the re-creation of the word through sign language and its subsequent artistic and performative treatment in performance and movement workshops.
Women and metamorphoses:
Fabulations of the feminine
Body and story workshops, 2020-2023
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ALDIR BLANC VISUAL ARTS AWARD 2021
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The body stores silenced stories that are forgotten or hidden in tissues, bones and organs. In this project, which began as an online platform for carrying out group actions during the pandemic, we seek to address women's truths through the imagination through body and movement workshops.
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Self-portrait
Photoperformance residual objectLife in pink (2023)
Tulle, steel cable, hanger, jute thread, paper box and graphite
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145 x 68 cm