Profile (for CV click here)
Mikhail Karikis is a Greek-born and London-based artist with a background in music, architecture and visual art. Equally embraced by the art gallery and the concert hall, his inter-disciplinary practice encompasses performance and sound art, music, video and drawing. Mikhail's recent work explores ideas of impossibility, difference and dis-articulation with a particular focus on the role of voice in addressing these notions (see Artist's Statement below).
Coined by critics a ‘sound alchemist’ (Le Monde), a 'primitive futurist' (French National Radio) and noted for his ‘sumptuous experimentalism’ (WIRE), Mikhail Karikis has a genre-challenging practice which includes the world-wide release of his music by pop experimentalist Björk (One Little Indian Records, 2005), the international releases οf his solo album Orphica (Sub Rosa, 2007) to enthusiastic critical acclaim, and his interdisciplinary album Morphica (Sub Rosa, 2009), nominated for a Qwartz Electornic Music Award (France). His sound art and performance art have featured in major institutions, galleries and festivals such as Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, BAFTA, British Film Institute, Sir John Soane's Museum, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Model Art & Niland Gallery, Kings Place London, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Musée des Beaux Arts de Nîmes, Whitstable Biennale, Colston Hall, Tate Britain, Lyric Hammersmith and De La Warr Pavilion. He has contributions to numerous music compilations including DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound (MIT Press & Sub Rosa, 2008) alongside Steve Reich, Aphex Twin, Antonin Artaud and Sonic Youth; Bend It Like Beckett (Aphasia Recordings, 2006) alongside Scanner, Stephen Vitiello and David Toop.
Recent collaborators include PRADA, Sonia Boyce, Zineb Sedira, Cantamus Choir, The University of Oxford, Kings Place, Oreet Ashery, Uriel Orlow, Alamire Consort with members of the Hilliard Ensemble and the Sixteen, the Neo-Futurist Collective, Juice Ensemble, Gabriel Prokofiev, NonClassical, Claudia Molitor, Scratch the Surface Ensemble, Conal Gleeson, Rozalb de Mura, Emerald Ensemble, Resonance FM and others.
Artist's Statement
Mikhail Karikis’s work explores notions of impossibility, and is concerned with the circumstances that generate encounters which demand a re-evaluation of processes and rituals of address. Acclaimed for his work with the voice, and employing an interdisciplinary approach in sound and visual art, as well as performance and music, in order to investigate ideas and politics of difference, Karikis creates situations for unlikely encounters with and between strangers, choirs, artists, members of the public and fantastical characters, often equipped with bodily extensions and besieged with impossible obsessions – such as singing duets with the stars, flying, speaking with their mouths shut, reciting the entire declaration of human rights from memory, contacting aliens, to name but a few. Drawing inspiration from the everyday, from fact and myth, and building on conceptual concerns of contemporary art, pop and experimental music, Karikis’s work ranges from the poetic to the dramatic and the tragicomic, and activates the potential for ruptures both in perception and ethical concerns.
More information
Mikhail was born in the port city of Thessaloniki in Greece. He moved to London in 1993 where he received his architectural and art training. He studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture (Univerity College London) with avant-gard British architects "Archigram" and the Slade School of Fine Art with theatre director Philip Prowse, art theorist Norman Bryson and artist Lis Rhodes, where he completed his doctorate 'The Acoustics of the Self' (2006).
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