In her distinctly autobiographical work, Erica Scourti deploys humour, irony, parody and self-exposure to engage with emotion, intimacy, work, doubt and self-improvement as well as examining the artist’s role vis-à-vis technology. Her work is an ongoing process of self-narration in which personal biography meets the collective, the personal meets the political and the real meets the fictional. Her visual practice starts from a process of self-observation and a systematic recording of daily life and digital habits through the creation of audio-visual diaries and collages. Through a systematic use of social media, her mobile phone, applications and the web, Scourti creates text-based works on fabric or paper and performances, videos and collages characterised by a lo-fi, raw and immediate aesthetic. Viewers become voyeuristic witnesses to her personal life, in addition to becoming witnesses to phrases, words and concepts with open-ended and multiple meanings.
The exhibition at ΕΜΣΤ is her first solo exhibition in Greece and as well as her first major museum exhibition.
Erica Scourti was born in Athens, and lives and works between Athens and London.
Curated by Daphne Vitali
ARTIST'S BIOGRAPHY
Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based in London and Athens. Embracing contingency, humour and lo-fi media, her work across text, fabric, video and performance explores life-writing as an open-ended process intimately imbricated with collectivity. Often reprocessing accidental archives of everyday life, from bed sheets to whatsapp messages, her work returns to themes of affect, labour and self-exposure, connecting the personal to impersonal structures of value and meaning.
Solo shows include: Chief Complaint at Almanac, London and Spill Sections at StudioRCA (both 2018). Group shows include: Survival Kit 13, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022), Athens Biennale 7: ECLIPSE (2021), Machines of Loving Grace, High Line, New York (2019), More Than Just Words [On the Poetic], Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2017), We Were Having a Little Flirt, Pump House Gallery, London (2018); Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond, Wellcome Collection, London, Big Bang Data, Somerset House, London (both 2016) Poetics and Politics of Data, HeK Basel (2015). Screenings and performances have been held among others at, the Hayward Gallery, London, Munich Kunstverein, FACT Liverpool, Transmediale at 15 Haus De Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and the David Roberts Art Foundation, London.
Scourti’s writing has been published in: On Care (Ma Biblioteque, 2020) Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press, 2018) Fiction as Method (2017, Sternberg) Documents of Contemporary Art: Information (2016, MIT Press) amongst others. In 2016 she was guest editor of the Happy Hypocrite journal (2019).
She has completed residencies at Cove Park, Scotland (2022), Haus N, Athens (2021), Rupert, Lithuania (2019) and Vermont Studio Centre (2012) amongst many others. She is currently undertaking a practice-based AHRC-funded PhD in Goldsmiths’ Art Department, and is a Lecturer in BA Fine Art at Central St Martins.
DIGITAL PUBLICATION
The exhibition is accompanied by a full colour digital catalogue:
ERICA SCOURTI-PROFILES OF YOU