Visual Artist

Maria Papacharalambous

Presented at “Art-introjection”, Casa Bianca, parallel program of the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale in 2015 and at “CairoTronica” Cairo International Electronic and New Media arts Symposium as part of a video-installation.

A video installation that manually describes the term: introjection*. The artwork symbolizes anyone’s introjections and the trail through a vortex, which liberates the self from what keeps us in the prison of fear and distraction. Challenges us to create consciously the inner self which any one of us decide to create for a liberation. Thus, we are called to decide what to keep and what to leave in order to achieve that transformation.

 * The introjection is a psychoanalytic term, which was created to describe how we tend to adopt ideas, behaviours and reactions from our environment. How we swallow what we are given by our parents, school, religion, who for many years are the leading representatives of the idea of authority. 

The introjection as a mental defence mechanism, which is mostly unconscious, works to relieve a person’s anxiety and to control clashes experienced due to occurring between social requirements and individual needs. The feature of introjection is that it influences dramatically the course of the development of the personality, preventing the individual to discover their own uniqueness and to contact and balance with it. Thus, he lives a life as an actor in a script written by others for him. The ‘musts’, that the individual has accepted, oppose to the ‘wants’.