In the exhibition Vascular,  the visual works of Christina O’Hara in combination with poems and a short film by the writer director Remi Gabriel, are presented,  in a dialogue about the body. A gendered body that can be sick, hurt but despite everything it continues to create. The inner experience, with all its complexities, is revealed on a very focused and intimate level, truly “vascular”.

Christina O’ Hara comes from County Kerry, Ireland. She uses mixed media in her artistic practice, articulating materials she gathers intuitively, in very fragile connections between them. The works she creates have a quality of fragmented network, in a way that she herself interprets as a parallel to the fragmentation of the structural protein that occurs in her own body, as a person suffering from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Through her work she creates a new empowering interpretation of her physical experience.

The works she presents in this exhibition are identified with its title. They are small floating sculptures that she calls “Vaskies” and are her personal interpretations of the vascular connections that occur or break. They were created from natural materials that she collected from the coasts around the Thessaloniki area as well as from figures that she herself made from clay. She composes them in a delicate and tender way, creating a condition of floating in space, transmuting her physical experience into a visual experience that can be shared.

Remi Gabriel is a Puerto Rican Jewish writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her writing interests revolve around gender expectations and socially imposed gender duality. She approaches filmmaking as an intense exercise in empathy and, as she herself says: “All of my work is filtered through a nuanced prism of feminism.” During her stay at bEam arts, she continued developing the script for her first feature film, while also completing her first poetry collection entitled “Pools of my own Secretions”.

The material shared in the exhibition are poems from her collection, which concern personal but at the same time very shared experiences of womanhood: the dual social messages that femininities receive in relation to how they “should” perform gender, how the game of patriarchy seems unwinnable, how all this creates pain, neuroses, desires and repulsions. At the end of it all, how pain is rooted within us, in a deep molecular level.