Projects
Photo credits: Stratis Stamatakos
MfA graduation show / February 2025 / Athens School of Fine Arts
Christina-Sylvia Simantira appropriates the phenomenon of circus-ing, which, through the lens of Brechtian distanciation, creates a social condition full of contradictions. This becomes the backdrop in the search for issues of identity, social stereotypes, self-defining roles, and controversial boundaries. “Circus-ing around: somber, pompous, grandiose!” Spectacular entertainment with political and social dimensions in a tragicomic framework. Large-scale fabrics with solemn inscriptions and paradoxical comments, incorporating elements of pseudo-symbolism, interact with ephemeral materials, creating pathways of questioning.
In constructing such a framework of contradictions, relaxed moods, contested boundaries, and self-irony, the work addresses the formation of the female role, primarily through the influence of the idea that a woman, as a mother, is responsible for providing food. Simultaneously, the image of her body became a part of her identity, and the consumption of food became linked to four levels: the physical, the social, the psychological, and the spiritual. The concepts of obesity and eating disorders reveal the complexity of the female experience, the social pressures for the "ideal" (sexualized) body, and resistance to patriarchal structures that impose these standards.
Inspired by the book "Fat is a Feminist Issue" by Susie Orbach, which examines the complex relationship women have with food, their bodies, and society—arguing that struggles with weight and diet are not merely personal health issues but deeply political and social matters—the work seeks to explore the connection between food and social roles through hybrid forms, allowing the levels to flow in all directions. Through the use of different materials, it aims to recognize the mechanisms that produce specific body images and lead to compulsive eating behaviors, whose causes are simultaneously psychological, physical, and social. These are inextricably linked to a sexualized woman, tasked with being attractive, providing sufficient food for her children, and creating daughters who are also attractive and capable of perpetuating this role.
At the core of all this is the concept of boundaries—defining shape, delineating roles, directing, trapping, but also protecting.
installation with 5 large scale paintings on fabric and a popcorn maker
Photo credits: Maria Toultsa
Part of the group show "Elongated Acts", curated by Katerina Nikolaou / Amphicar Studio (Galatsi) 2026
Christina-Sylvia Simantira’s “war for peace” (2026) is an in situ installation created within the artist’s studio, where everyday life and artistic practice coexist. Using humble materials such as kraft paper rolls, tape, and collected ephemera — invitations, tickets, and printed matter — the work explores the shifting boundaries between material, memory, and representation. The materials remain unchanged, preserving their original identity while acquiring new conceptual significance through their placement and accumulation. The installation reflects on the reciprocal relationship between lived experience and artistic process, where objects and memories function simultaneously as traces, narratives, and active agents of meaning. Even within conceptual art, where an absence of materiality is often implied, matter remains the invisible foundation that makes the existence — and even the denial — of form possible. The work unfolds through a series of paradoxes and reversals: the studio becomes both lived space and representation, material acts simultaneously as process and result, and war itself is repeatedly justified as a path toward peace — a contradiction that continues to shape contemporary global reality. Within this unstable cycle of oppositions, meaning emerges not from certainty, but from the fragile relationship between conflicting states.
installation in the art studio with kraft paper, collected printed matter, painted wardrobe door.
Photo credits: Maria Toultsa
Solo show, curated by Alexandra Malakasioti / Sgg Artstudio (Exarchia) 2026
In the upcoming exhibition at art studio ssg, thread does not function merely as a material but becomes a carrier of memory, a path, a narrative. A thread that begins with a gesture and gradually unfolds within the space, revealing fragments of a story, first that of the artist and, subsequently, that of the viewer.
The practice of Christina–Sylvia Simantira begins with the line as a primary element. Through repeated, continuous movements, the line transforms into surface, into landscape, into a field of experience. Its starting point lies in the bodily process of knitting itself: in the movements the thread requires as it passes through the hands, as it intersects, as it forms a weave. These movements are then transferred onto paper and canvas.
The paintings in the exhibition are composed of repeated lines, fragments of a narrative that is not imposed but emerges through duration and accumulation. Just as thread forms fabric through successive movements, the image similarly develops through layers, overlaps, and rhythm. The process remains open, without a predetermined direction, allowing imaginary landscapes and unknown places to emerge.
At the same time, the exhibition space will include works in which the thread itself appears as a material element, reinforcing the connection between the act of weaving and the painterly gesture. The material and its trace coexist, creating a dialogue between the object and its representation.
Through this process, the thread can also be seen as a metaphor for deeper structures of memory and experience. As in the theory of archetypes by Carl Gustav Jung, where certain images and motifs reappear within the collective unconscious, the repeated lines in the works seem to activate forms and landscapes that move beyond individual experience, touching something shared and recognizable.
The exhibition proposes an experience of navigation in which the thread functions both metaphorically and literally: as a path guiding the viewer from the personal to the collective, from individual memory to the possibility of a shared narrative.
Photo credits: Stratis Stamatakos
Athens School of Fine Arts / awarded by Nefroiatriki / Athens 2021
On the occasion of the disease “lupus” which can cause kidney disease among other things, the wolf comes to the fore, which was an animal that symbolized the fighter-warrior already in ancient times and was an omen of victory.
The links in the chain that form the word lupus (“lupus” in Latin) are cut from filter sheets, in order to refer to the function of the kidneys as a filter for the blood and the body in general. Due to kidney disease, the patient is “tied” to the dialysis machine day in and day out. However, this process of “artificial filter”, saves time and the good omen (the wolf) foreshadows the finding of a compatible donor.
The background consisting of pink marble refers color-wise (with the red “veins”) to the parenchymal of vital organs and, as a precious material, also underlines the wisdom and magnificence of the functioning of the human organism.
1,54mx0,62mx0,16m., wood, marble, filters cut in the shape of a ring/chain.
Photo credits: Stratis Stamatakos
Krwawa Rosa
Athens_November 2019 / Prize from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Athens. / Project in cooperation with the A` painting studio and the department of art history and theory of the Athens School of Fine Arts, the gallery Ikastikos Kiklos and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Athens.
Krwawa (bloody) Rosa, as Rosa Luxemburg, is known in Polish. The nail as a sharp object “injures” the solid material (the established system) and makes the rebel, the mass, the system bleeds.
The soft material of the fabric and the different patterns are symbols of Rosa's feminine side, of the own identity of each individual of the rebellious mass and of an alternative proposal of dialectical radicalism. The story of each individual plays just as important a role as the concentrated power of the united mass. The nails are nailed to a hard background covered with a leathery fabric, giving them a physical and human dimension.
45X35cm., nails, wrapped in fabric, nailed to wood and Styrofoam covered with fabric.
Rubick`s Cube / Tidal Flow Art / Library of Athens School of Fine Arts / Athens 2021
No matter what kind of harassment, it gets defined by the “no”. The consent sets the limit. A no is a no, even if it has to to with a harmless water-splash by a water-pistol. The water-pistol as a symbol of chasteness implies any kind of brutality, even if it has a “phallic shape”, or just a verbal one.
A project about sexual harassment curated by Jenny Tsoumpri.
Photo credits: Stratis Stamatakos
Photo credits: Christina-Sylvia Simantira
Park of Nea Smyrni / Ionian Festival / 2020 / Curated by J.Tsoumpri.
Christina-Sylvia Simantira creates out of the shell of colored, useless, plastic pots a hanging living room. The pots are becoming useless, they get recomposed and form a flat surface, that re- creates one side of a piece of furniture, like a hanging poster, without any functional value.
Our home, the place where we live, our “living-room”, our planet, is not only a good-looking frame, that we shape according to our needs. The shell is as important as the content.
The environmental ethics are, even nowadays still searching to find out which position in the hierarchy of the priorities of the contemporary human it takes. For him it doesn’t seem obvious to show respect towards himself and his cohabitants on this planet-home. The dangerous behavior towards the environment affects negatively not only our “living room”, but also all its habitants , which means ourselves, our fellow human beings, the nature and all the living species.
An artwork created for the art competition for the Hellenic Public Power Corporation (DEH) / Athens 2021
“A dad, a worker at height who uses fall protection equipment to work ,wears the wings his daughter gave him at work!”
330cm*100cm., mock-up paper, cables, LED lights
Photo Credits: Georgios Gkikopoulos
Photo credits: Alexandros Belegris
Teleology
Studio / Athens School of Fine Arts / 2016
Questions that enter from life into art and from art into life. With the triviality of the material I seek to connect them to everyday life by implying that the answer lies there.
Leftovers
Degree show / Athens School of Fine Arts / 2017
In this series of works, it is a collection of memories that we revive by using everyday objects from our familiar environment. I hang the memories with hangers and nails trying to preserve them and protect them from decay. The remnant of a story becomes a symbol and the work highlights the traces of a past environment, in which various important and insignificant/unimportant stories have developed.
Photo credits: Alexandros Belegris