Ventiko is a critically acclaimed conceptual artist working in photography, film, performative experiences and social practice. Her/their work focuses on de/re-constructing societal positions on identity specifically sexuality, persona, gender and the state of the “modern woman”.
BIOGRAPHY
Ventiko’s works have been exhibited and experienced internationally at art fairs (PULSE, Select, Korean International Art Fair, Sluice, Photo LA), Galleries (US, Europe, Dominican Republic, Korea), Institutions (Tate Modern, MOMA) and in the public sphere through interventions (US, UK, Serbia, Dominican Republic, and Italy).
She has been featured in Interview Magazine, Quiet Lunch, Korea Monthly Photo, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Bedford & Bowery, Vulture, Emergency Index, Cool Hunting, Gothamist, Artist News, Posture Magazine, T Magazine, Frieze Magazine, The Creator’s Project, The L Magazine, Artnet News, Beautiful Decay, Vogue Italia to name a few.
Creating platforms for others to shine is a quintessential aspect of her practice. Through her creations Animamus Art Salon (founded 2011) and Performance Anxiety (founded 2012), she has worked with over 200+ artists curating and facilitating happenings, exhibitions, lectures and residencies on their behalf.
Sylva Dean and Me, Vogue Italia Shoot, NYC, 2015
STATEMENT
My practice is an amalgamation of constructed photographic narratives and public interventions that ultimately speak to the idea of identity, or performing identity. Throughout my relationship with the photographic image, I’ve been creating an ever-expanding visual language expressing my social positions from sexuality to the general, persona and the state of the “Modern Woman."
Symbolism from Antiquity through the Baroque epoch and classical Biblical imagery is combined with the obscene to examine a moralistic duality while juxtaposing the traditional with the contemporary, uprooting and exposing binaries within the human condition and displaying them to the viewer in deliberately confrontational gestures. Rather than wait for the ‘perfect moment,’ I deliberately construct a scene that is not situated in a state of time; but rather, in a state of mind.
Like the photographic side of my practice, my work in performance and public interventions questions different performances of identity. My ongoing performance piece, Sylva Dean and Me, places mask-clad performers in intricately constructed and bound wearable sculptures, which I have created from recycled nursery school milk cartons, into public spaces.
Stripped of explicit identity, Sylva Dean and Me acts as a palimpsest upon which to redraw the illness of humanity and the stark beauty accompanying it. To explore and occupy a liminal space between mediums Sylva Dean and Me explores gender performativity and the continuous, ever evolving relationship with Otherness.