Born in France in 1985, Théodora Barat is a visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher. She lives and works in Pantin.
She was a resident at the Villa Medici.
Theodora Barat’s work spans cinema and the visual arts, encompassing sculpture, installation, and film.
Project
Theodora’s areas of investigation combine film, sculpture, and installation. They focus on changing environments, on those ultimate moments when the artificial landscape becomes a sign of our lifestyles and ways of thinking. In recent years, Theodora’s work has taken a documentary turn, focusing in particular on the birth of the modernist ideology that underpins our capitalist societies. With this in mind, the United States has become a recurring subject of her research.
The project she is working on at the Villa Medicis focuses on studying and researching the possibility of documentary sculpture. How can a sculpture be given documentary value without becoming a reconstruction? How can a historical context be recreated without it becoming an illustration? The project finds its origins in the buildings that occupy Fellini’s backgrounds, in Italian nuclear power plants undergoing decommissioning, and in rationalist architecture. All are different incarnations of modernity, different witnesses to its upheavals and transformations. The project aims to reveal the historicity and documentary value of these buildings. Based on this corpus, Théodora Barat will create a series of sculptures, installed and staged in the Roman suburbs. Thus, the boundaries between filming, construction sites, and reconstruction will become blurred. This past, thus revived, these narratives, thus reactivated, will bring different temporalities into collision. But this time, the remains will be fictional.
Artist’s career
Théodora Barat studied at the Nantes School of Fine Arts before joining Le Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts. She is currently developing a research and creation thesis within the RADIAN doctoral program. She has won the Audi Talents Award (2016), the FACE / Étant Donnés grant, the AIC (2020), and the Institut pour la Photographie’s research and creation support program (2021).
Her work has been presented at K11 – Musea (Hong Kong), Cneai, the Emily Harvey Foundation and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York), Nuit Blanche, La Friche de la Belle de Mai, Mains d’Œuvres, Glassbox, and CAC Vilnius (Lithuania), as well as in video programming at the Palais de Tokyo and numerous international festivals.