Dyana Gravina
My mom's torn tights
Performance/Photography
2022
Where does the unfolding of one’s own sexuality and identity sit within reclusion and exploitation?
Dyana Gravina (They/She) is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, activist, mover, and community builder. Currently MA in ‘Gender Sexuality and Culture’ at Birkbeck University. They have collaborated and curated projects with partners and venues including RCA, King’s College London, LADA Live Art Development Agency, Ugly Duck, Mimosa House, Women’s Art Library, RichMix, Richard Saltoun Gallery, 198 contemporary Art and Learning, to mention a few. Her performance actions and performative lectures have been shown and hosted in the UK and internationally including, Artist Association Israel, East Street Arts, Wellcome Collection, ]Performance Space[, Leyden Gallery, The Yard Theatre, Institute Centre of Photography ICP ( NYC), Art Basel / Richard Saltoun Gallery, Minusoffspace (Vienna), Menoparkas Gallery (Kaunas), Gruentaler9 (Berlin).
” My artistic and curatorial practices are interested in feminisms, migration, and body politics manifesting in a transdisciplinary body of work that combines movement, actions, photography, video, and text. I use somatic movement as a research method; the body as material. I use both autobiographical and collective knowledge to challenge the perception of the self under social constructions and cultural environments and redefine and deconstruct univocal notions of the ‘female’. In my recent work initiated at the DOMUS Art residency in Galatina, I revisit my upbringing in a small town in the south of Italy and I often choose ‘tights’, a garment associated with specific imagery and standards of ‘femininity’ and sensuality, to reconnect and tell stories of womxn from the working class and disadvantaged socio-political background. Those women were my mother, my grandmothers, and my ancestors. I am finding my way back to those identities to review and re-shape “
