Artwork

Catinca Malaimare is a London-based visual artist from Romania whose practice encompasses performance, sculpture, film, sound, and writing. Staging her choreography amongst anthropomorphic machines and luminous screens, Malaimare’s multi-sensory performances reflect on our body’s intimate relationship with technological objects.  “I build everything through the prism of performance” explains Catinca. “The body is a great source of inspiration for me for its constant relationship with everything else around it: other bodies, non-bodies, environments and sensorial factors.”

Catinca holds a BA from the University for the Creative Arts, in Farnham and in 2022 she completed her MA at the Royal Academy Schools. During her time at the RA, Malaimare participated in a residency in Japan, which was pivotal in shaping her perception of objects’ relationship to the human body. “There I experienced a specific tenderness towards objects, craft and electronics alike, which made me think about how we interact with our material environment. In our culture, there is no embedded care towards machines or devices – our screens are cracked, we are missing pixels from video walls.  This is why in the context of my practice, I’m attracted to discarded objects, such as an old mobile conveyor belt or a 90s Panasonic stereo –  these are all relics of the past.” Continuously exploring this relationship between the artificial and the organic, in Malaimare’s performances, the body never appears solo – it is always in a direct, caring relationship with everything that surrounds it.

The recurring visual elements that transcend Malaimaire’s practice – including painted leather costumes and surfaces, metallic blue or red colour gradients and the use of spray paint – carry a specific timestamp, evoking past utopias. “The idea of ‘futurity’ has always been a source of inspiration for me – something that envisions and anticipates the future while being made with the knowledge of the present” she adds. Paying tribute to this admiration Catinca's latest piece, Jinx, Nevesta! performed in Berlin, creates a nostalgic sphere by employing the aesthetics of obsolete technologies from the 80s and 90s. In the performance, the defunct yet gleaming amusement rides the performers mount themselves onto, become symbolic vehicles for traversing time and resurrecting collective memories. Exploring how bodies exist in, and interact with their different environments, Malaimare’s performances also appear outside the gallery walls, in unconventional settings that allow for their raw physicality to come to the fore. Previously, Catinca has staged immersive performances in Club Are, London, where “the performers became part of the dance floor’s energetic body, and the boundaries of the work extended wherever their limbs reached.”

Malaimare’s work has been widely exhibited and performed in the UK and beyond. Her solo exhibitions in London include Gamma and Omega Hold Hands at the Zabludowicz Collection, Metamours at Final Hot Desert, and Astropriest at Brooke Benington as part of the London Gallery Weekend. As for her future plans, Catinca hopes to continue pushing the physical and spatial boundaries of her choreography beyond institutional frameworks. “Scale is a crucial idea for me. I don't want to be constrained to traditional gallery spaces – I want to have a performance on a boat; in the middle of a huge body of water, like an ocean or a sea; or at the runway of an airport.”