Bio

Stathis Yapoutzidis-Karras (b.1993) was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. His Pontic-Greek refugee roots and childhood play a vital role in his work, growing up among noisy, brutal construction workers and love. His practice delves into themes of universal human existence, such as identity, change, and the human behavior with the entanglement of socio-historical implications. He confronts values and concepts of life that have been distorted in memory to impregnate them with new meanings and modern mythologies. This recontextualization highlights themes of transformation, resilience, and the struggle for meaning in an extreme present. He focuses on how the pragmatic could be unreal and how the politic could be theatrical. Stathis’s work mainly composed of sculptures and installations broken down into figures, symbols and objects. He emphasizes on the lo-fi recording of stillness or loudness into his main medium, steel.

Besides his artistic practice, he has also experiment with sound forms and music through running a garage-hardcore punk band under the name PISSTONS, during his studies from 2011 until 2018. Having also a background in industrial design has affected his practice as material becomes a significant medium to express his messages. His method is using mechanisms like drawing, painting or dramaturgy as voices to create sonority through distorted images in despair of decadence and oblivion.
He lives and works between Greece and The Netherlands and his work has been presented in Greece, Italy and The Netherlands.

“I’m searching about the ‘decadence’ in reality and the ‘political’ in absurdity. I make things to echo my anger. I’m concerned with noise and catharsis. I like to perform and shout my thoughts. The emotion of injustice inside my memories became anger that transformed into allegories and dramatic interpretations into my practice. I was always looking at what is missing from perfection. I’m very interested to find the deep memory in things and carry it till I have to create a myth, to get over the trauma, to finish history.”