Tita Bonatsou

Tita Bonatsou lives in a listed, neoclassical house made by Saxon architect Ernst Ziller, who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries designed many royal, municipal and private buildings in Athens and other cities in Greece. It is a house with many rooms, many corners, many levels and its own history. It is this house that was the starting point for the exhibition Le ballet du jour.

The artist decided to open the doors of her house to show excerpts from her work as a photographer from the beginnings of her career to now. Photographs are hung in the house’s fourteen rooms to open a new dialogue. Projects from different periods are shown together so as to tell a new story, that of a person’s journey, of a woman, an artist searching. The photographs are like the steps of a long walk, each one representing its own moment in time and space. They are like the steps of a choreography, like the movements of a ballet or those that we follow as we walk through life – these “small, unimportant moments that are yet so great” as she likes to say.

Tita Bonatsou is constantly looking for new technical methods to render her photographs: from painting on negatives to printing on unorthodox surfaces to finding the most adequate ways to give movement to what is static through repetition, optical illusion or abstraction. For her a photograph opens many different roads and brings forth new dimensions of the original image. She has learned to approach photography through an oscillation between thoughts, dreams and reality – a triptych, which has become a source of inspiration as well as, often enough, a way of presenting her work.