For the 2024 edition of NADA Miami, Nathalie Karg Gallery presents a selection of Nefeli Papadimouli’s (b. Athens, 1988) recent paper, textile, and leather sculptures. Papadimouli continues to explore space's relationship to the body and societal systems. The two large-scale fans, part of the Milieu mouvant (2021) series, present a landscape of vigorous connectivity. These monumental fans can be opened and closed, transforming the architectural space and shifting the proximity between people creating moments of both intimacy and withdrawal, division and union. One fan, crafted from wood and paper, symbolizes the fragility of borders, while the other, made of wood and organic cotton, beckons interaction and disruption. The two leather costumes, Cocoon (sardine) 2023 and Cocoon (ladybug) 2023, emphasize the significance of closeness. Made from recycled colored leather, these cocoons envelop both the wearer and another being— whether human, animal, or plant—in a large pocket that opens outward. Drawing from the artist's own experience of motherhood, these pieces encourage self-reflection and remind us how living beings deeply influence each other's growth.
Nefeli Papadimoli (b. 1988, Athens)
With a background in architecture and the visual arts, Nefeli Papadimouli works across media, from participatory actions in public space to sculpture, photography, drawing, costume design, moving images, installation and performance. Inspired by phenomenology, feminism and contemporary political theory, her proto-architectural approach explores spatial configurations of distance as essential elements in social conflict, negotiation and equilibrium processes. Informed by utopian architectural and artistic avant-gardes as much as contemporary dance, her series of modular, connective, elastic sculptures function at once as prompts for collective movement and architectures of assembly, investigating the interdependence of cultural and natural forms and exploring the notion of space through its relationship to the body. Conceived as spaces of encounter, her radically inclusive works manifest a desire to engage the bodies of performers and spectators, humans and non-humans, in gestures and reciprocal movements in settings ranging from museum spaces to urban and natural environments. Like a second skin, her costumes both produce and dissolve the body's individual and collective boundaries in a playful and emancipatory shift of perspective. Her works and performances stimulate behavioral patterns and collective processes to create affirmative grounds for the emergence of a critical spatial and bodily practice that destabilizes preconceived notions of identity and alterity. Her drawings, photographs and videos similarly inhabit the space between performance, document, trace and graphic notation. The artist's continued engagement with relational patterns and collective movement places Papadimouli’s practice directly related to abstraction as an artistic and political language. At the same time, her playful blurring of boundaries between sculpture, drawing, photography, live forms and durational media associates her with the historical avant-garde.
Papadimouli has exhibited widely, with recent solo shows at Le Crédac (2023) and Ter Posterie (2022). Her work is featured in the 17th Lyon Biennial (2024-2025) and the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan (2024). She has received notable awards, including the Artworks Fellowship (2018), Prix Dauphine pour l’Art Contemporain (2019), and the Prix Pierre Cardin (2023). Currently, she is in residency at the Fondation Fiminco (2024-2025). Her works are held in esteemed collections such as the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and Frac Grand Large.
