🪞My installation Psyche, 2026 in Vienna. 💄
Objects made by my studio, music by
@nefelibravaki (link in bio) and an here’s an extract from Vanessa Mueller’s essay “Immersed in suggestive darkness, a dressing table, a ‘Psyche’ as it is called in Austria, is presented in the center, with the repertoire that makes worldly metamorphosis possible in the first place. However, the mirror as an instrument of self-reflection and transformation triggered by the image reflects at most us, the viewers. The furniture that supports it is made of steel, and the utensils on it are less plush than the ambience historically demands. One might find them subtle, like the objects in Marina Abramovic’s performance Rhythm 01, which are surgically placed on a table so that the audience can perform all kinds of actions on the artist.
This set design – every detail a piece of a larger puzzle and encoded in multiple ways – relies on contrasts, appearing hard or soft, warm or cold. The overall theatrical atmosphere is also reminiscent of intimate, self-contained spaces of pent-up emotion, where euphoria can quickly turn to despair. Mitsola cites the horror vacui of the apartment from Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as a source of inspiration, as well as the lavish sets of the ballet film The Tales of Hoffmann. The dissected staging of visual opulence and dramatic, even affected sentiment, the interplay of love, desire, submission and downfall, seems to shine through here and there in every part of the décor, in every painted emotion.
And yet Fae O, whose psyche seems to be explored in this series of paintings, with her conscious and unconscious feelings, her emotional outbursts and her jouissance, is ultimately above all a linguistic creature. Fae is derived from the Greek word Φαΐω (to shine brightly) – Sofia Mitsola loves etymology. Fae O sounds like a name that can achieve fame even in its incompleteness, like Anna or Jackie O. And yet it remains more of a phonetic paraphrase, an initial sound as in fancy, phantasm or fantasy – something that materializes in speech only to disappear again.”
