About

Artist’s Statement

Time shapes and nourishes the void in space—much like ancient Greek architecture, where temples were not enclosed structures but open arrangements of columns, defined equally by solid forms and the luminous intervals between them. This architectural principle, articulated by Louis Kahn—“the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is”—has profoundly shaped my thinking. The rhythm of light/no-light/light, and the presence of the void as a generative force, forms the conceptual foundation of my artistic practice.

I am drawn to the in-between: the threshold where bodies pass, hesitate, and transform. It is within these intervals that I investigate forms of social “invisibility”: the marginalized, the displaced, the stigmatized, the toxic, the internal trauma. The immigrant body, the female body, the neurotic or phobic body, the abused or abducted body—these bodies inhabit voids created by power structures. They move through cycles of collapse and re-emergence: walking, stumbling, crawling, they persist as volumes drifting between presence and erasure.

This emergence from invisibility is what activates my work.

The void becomes a site of liberation, a place where one can breathe outside the constraints of systems that suffocate expression. Much like Malevich’s Black Square, the void is both origin and field—an open, unbounded space where my projects germinate and grow. In this sense, I treat space architecturally: as something sculpted by absence, by light, and by the orientation of bodies within it.

Existential concerns—ecological degradation, emotional desensitization, and the fragility of human presence in the Anthropocene—drive my creative process. Through narration and hybrid documentation, using photography, film, performance, or micro-installations, I work to map these tensions. I approach the world as an architectural site: layered, eroded, illuminated, and interrupted. What interests me is the excavation of the Anthropocene as a lived and embodied terrain—one shaped by the voids we inhabit, the ones we create, and the ones we try to escape. 

CV

Kleopatra Haritou is an Athens born visual thinker working at the intersection of moving image, photography, performance & micro-installations. She studied Fine Art Photography / Image & Communication in New York, Athens and London (FOCUS, C. Saint Martins & GOLDSMITHS—supervised by Ian Jeffrey). 

Her large scale series “The Refugee Housing of Alexandras Ave.” was presented at the Benaki Museum and other venues. 

“ACROBATS,” her large-scale public installations, was presented outside the Kerameikos cemetery, developed through a year-long collaboration with drug-dependent individuals, homeless people and sex workers in Athens. 

She recently completed her mid-length essay film “IERA ODOS” -not yet released- a contemporary reading of Europe’s oldest road through the myth of Persephone and the liminal spaces of the Anthropocene. Europe’s oldest road is paralleled with Persephone’s journey from the Underworld to the surface to bring Spring. This in-between space — during the Anthropocene — becomes the woman whose violent abduction shaped her entire life.

Her forthcoming publication with texts of Erwin Wurm & Aristides Antonas is completed, to be published. 

Simultaneously, she has begun development and shooting of her feature documentary “REST IN PIECES,” funded by the Greek Film Centre and ERT. The film explores the mourning industry in the era of the modern Greek state — a bittersweet excavation of the necro-industry, asking: How can we rest — in pieces — in a world where even death has become a business?

For over two decades she has worked as a set photographer for cinema and television, while her artistic practice has been exhibited widely in Greece and abroad, including institutions such as the Benaki Museum, Art Athina, Mykonos Biennale, Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine (Paris), PhotoBiennale Thessaloniki, the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, the Benetton Foundation, and numerous galleries and cultural foundations in Europe & Greece.