Aliki Paliou

The story of how you met and how you came to the shared decision to embark on a creative collaboration.

ALIKI PALIOU: Marina and I met during my graduation project at the Athens School of Fine Arts, in Rena Papaspyrou’s studio. It was an installation with drawings, photographs, and video focusing on motherhood, as I had just had my first child at the time. Marina wrote on a small paper plate that she liked my work and wanted to meet me. I was overjoyed.

Since then, I’ve had three more children, but I never stopped painting. I simply wasn’t exhibiting my work. From the beginning, there was a mutual respect and a shared visual and conceptual language between Marina and me, so our creative collaboration emerged very naturally.

MARINA FOKIDIS: Exactly. I was struck by the way Aliki depicted the experience of motherhood, not through a rosy lens, but with honesty and multiplicity. From then on, I found her dynamic visual language, her style, and her almost obsessive use of repetition deeply compelling.

Over time, we reconnected under different circumstances and now work closely together as curator and artist. I wrote a text about the works that stemmed from that graduation project and have been consistently following her practice, which continues to surprise me.

How did the exhibition in Brazil come about, what did it include, and what was the response from the audience there

A.P.: The exhibition in Brazil followed my solo show in Vienna with Wilhelmina’s Gallery. At the same time, the Spark Festival was taking place, and Karla Osorio, who was participating in the festival, visited my exhibition. That’s how she became familiar with my work. Marina was also there, as curator of the Spark Art Fair, and that connection ultimately led to our collaboration in Brazil.

M.F.: I never stopped working closely with Aliki. I continue to present her work and invite people to her studio whom I believe would resonate with her practice. This led to several exhibitions. One of these encounters was with Karla Osorio, who saw Aliki’s work both in Vienna and later in her studio in Athens. She immediately invited us to her gallery, proposing a solo exhibition of Aliki’s work curated by me.

Is there a story behind each work? If so, Aliki, which one do you love most and why?

A.P.: Yes, there is indeed a story behind every work. The paintings of the past two years were born out of my travels both literal and symbolic. Sometimes they are inspired by places I’ve visited, other times by moments, gestures, or situations that left a mark on me and became part of how I perceive the world. For me, painting is a way of understanding—beauty, contradictions, and the many layers that make up reality.

At first glance, the works may appear light, pleasant, or like simple tourist moments, but upon closer observation they carry deeper meaning. This duality is what interests me.

For example, The Gift was inspired by my trip to Sri Lanka. It’s not merely a tourist snapshot; it’s a reflection on otherness. A child, open to new experiences and the richness of different cultures, reaches out to a local resident offering a gift. This gift is not material but symbolic, it is knowledge and a new way of seeing the world. In contrast, the posture of the adult figure, the dripping paint, and the presence of red suggest restraint, rigidity, and stereotypes already internalized.

In The Drone, a young girl pauses her play to look at a drone hovering above the sand. It appears to be an innocent moment of curiosity. But the drone carries a double meaning: it is both a toy and a weapon of war. This duality fascinates me. I want to show how violence can easily become part of everyday life, how war can silently appear, disguised as play.

In The Moon, the figure’s posture is unsettling because it doesn’t belong on the beach. She is lying as if in her bed, caught in a private moment that has somehow spilled into a public space. This collapse between intimacy and exposure reflects how, in the age of social media, our private gestures and inner states become visible, making us feel vulnerable.

The Adolescent, inspired by my walks in the forests of Rio, depicts a girl who has just bathed under a waterfall. She is half-naked, experiencing the freedom nature offers. Yet the athletic sneakers she wears, standing out clearly, remind us of consumer culture. Consumerism is present even in moments of deep connection with nature.

In After Prometheus, I reflect on living in a world of artificial intelligence, drones, and surveillance, where Prometheus’ gift is no longer fire but something colder and more ambiguous. The black object flying in the sky is a cross, a bird, a drone. We inhabit a new sky where mythical birds have become machines.

The Traffic Light, inspired by walks along Copacabana beach, addresses how different rhythms coexist in a globalized world. Two tourists walk slowly along the shore, while a Brazilian mother shields her baby under a blue umbrella. Her partner slumps into a chair, perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps resignation. Above them floats a traffic light, absurdly attempting to regulate their rhythms. One figure moves calmly through a bright yellow space, while another runs in fear. We are constantly aware of other lives unfolding elsewhere, sometimes in crisis.

If I had to choose one work, it would probably be The Drone, because through it I realized exactly what preoccupies me. It most directly condenses the dualities I explore: play and violence, innocence and threat, familiarity and unease. Painterly, it is also important to me because I used multiple layers, figures that fade, others that emerge, different painting techniques coexisting, transparencies, erasures, paint poured, thrown, or applied directly onto the canvas.

What kind of response did the exhibition receive from the audience in Brazil?

A.P.: It was fascinating to see how the Brazilian audience “read” the works differently, as expected, through the lens of their own experiences. In The Moon, they saw a girl sleeping on the beach, a completely normal and realistic image of everyday life in Rio, while a Portuguese viewer living temporarily in Brazil connected it to migration.

In The Traffic Light, some viewers saw a robbery unfolding while others continued their daily routines. In The Gift, some perceived an illegal transaction, while in The Drone, someone thought the girl was simply holding a kite, a symbol of freedom, without the darker connotations of a drone. A woman who grew up in the Amazon singled out The Monkey, as she was deeply moved by the image of a child observing nature through a mobile phone.