She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt

Solo show at ROZENSTRAAT a rose is a rose is a rose. Amsterdam 2025

Curated by Angeliki Tzortzakaki and Madelon van Schie. 

‘She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt explores seemingly contradictory iconic representations of femininity. Pinaka’s mutable subjects surface through a variety of mediums. They transcend the conventional, consciously seeking their existence in the realm of fiction and fantasy, free from the constraints of social codes and expectations. In many ways, they embody the spirit of childhood, where everything still lies open in potential, and boundaries of identity are fluid and permeable.

The exhibition and the related performance start from the ‘princess’ as a complex feminine icon and a product of a white, imperialist Europe that has come down and profoundly influenced the southern Balkans. In the context of the newly formed, post-Ottoman Greece of the early 19th century, royalty arrived for the first time with the Bavarian adolescent king Otto and Amalie von Oldenburg, known in Greek as Amalia. Although not explicitly addressed in this exhibition, Pinaka views this historical event and its broader context, as the inauguration of whitewashing and homogenisation of the numerous ethnic groups and populations that coexisted throughout Greece and the region at that time. In a country that lacked a ‘national identity’ approved by Europe, Amalia became a symbol of the representation of the Western woman, an icon that every feminine and formerly peripheral or ‘uncivilised’ body should aspire to become. Pinaka playfully subverts the deeply-rooted image of this imperial immaculate body that also shaped her own concept of womanhood as a child. In She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt, we encounter abstract, raw, and disruptive versions of this archetype, such as the ‘Princess of the Night’ or the ‘Princess of the Ocean’. Inspired by Greek carnivalesque aesthetics of the 90’s, their representations are a portal to a dream-like world, where excess flows freely and complicates codes. These untamed princesses open up a multiplicity of possibilities, dimensions, and intersections of ‘the feminine’. Figures, whose identities remain unresolved, resisting definition or articulation.’

Extract from curatorial text