ELENI ZERVOU
she/they | b. 1994, Athens | based in London
Eleni Zervou‘s practice revolves around storytelling and world-building through staged installations, sculpture, painting, comics, and film. Currently, they delve into themes of family, grief, and middle-class life, drawing from personal experiences and mediated communications with their family in Greece. They blend hybrid figurative sculptures and paintings with personal observational film clips, exploring utopian imaginings of bodily and gender transcendence alongside moments of domestic horror and mundane intimacy/absence. By critically revisiting their classical sculpture training, they challenge their own conceptions around representations of the body, femininity, and nature, evoking intimate kinships unbound by binary notions of existence.
In Zervou‘s recent sculptural installation, "This Too Will Not Pass," they anchor these concerns within the juxtaposition of London and their mother’s hometown, Sitia in Crete. The installation features a group of five life-sized half-canine, half-human entities seated on a bare mattress, watching a video of the artist's grandfather tending to his field in the aftermath of the October '22 flood. The phrase "This too will not pass," a floral reverse-affirmation, is painted across a corner of the room.
Their motivation stems from the imperative to materialize uncomfortable realizations, employing horror as a narrative device and (re)creating hybrid worlds and themselves in the process. If their work could be summarized in a sentence, it would be "BITE-THE-HAND THAT-FEEDS-YOU."
