Filmmaker and performer Samira Elagoz, graduated at SNDO in 2016, wins the Silver Lion at Venice Biennale 2022. Samira entwines Egyptian and Finnish origins, and is the author of original and abrasive docu-performances.
The awards ceremony will take place during the 50th International Theatre Festival to be held from June 24th to July 3rd 2022 in Venice. The Lions were recommended by the Directors of the Theatre Department Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte (ricci/forte) and approved by the Board of Directors of La Biennale di Venezia.
Read more on the Biennale website
About Samira Elagoz
The artist Samira Elagoz – winner of the Silver Lion – is featured for the first time at the Biennale Teatro with the Italian premiere of Seek Bromance, his latest creation. A product of the forced hibernation in the time of Covid, Seek Bromance is a “romance situated at the end of the world between two transmasculines, a saga almost four hours long developed in collaboration with Cade Moga” (S. Elagoz).
In the motivation for the award the Directors write: “Bringing his body to the stage and visually sectioning it with its paradoxes and its multiform facets the way Nan Goldin does, focusing his implacable gaze on solitude, on the human relationship between genders in the digital era and in a society that eschews regularisation and control, exploring the porous boundaries between the real and the virtual, investigating the effects of love, gender, femininity, desire, its consequent annihilation and the brutal covert power plays, Samira Elagoz embarks on a journey that is intimate and poetic, yet ironic and perturbing at the same time, exploring the clichés and issues that concern not only self-representation in the media, the behaviour of the male in his attempts at seduction in a relationship of domination and/or submission, as well as the tool-body as the terrain for a necessary and inevitable artistic experimentation.
Camera in hand, using his own self and relying on personal experiences cultivated on applications and websites, amalgamated with videos and photographic footage of real life, highlighting the manipulation of bodies on these platforms and skilfully broadening the typical relationships between masculinty and femininity online, in his creations Samira Elagoz flirts with the infinite possibilities of performance to shape an original language and offers us – with the aim of experimenting his own changing gender identity as an expressive devining road – a unique brand of performance-reporting, multimedia happening and docufiction”.
