August 2024

Athens-based artist Daglara explores how performance can create a martyr narrative with extreme emotions, and how one can reach a degree of frenzy. Her make-up, her art’s protagonist, is a trans-speciesist dream. Inspired by facial expression from the animal kingdom, her beauty looks recall to mind sci-fi creatures and the hypersexualised femme icon. Serpentine eyes, a dolphin brow, and alien cheekbones — with Daglara, it’s all about hybridisation.   Using a mix of seemingly disparate references, Daglara combines queer performativity with cutting-edge beauty and garment creation to boost problems with gender subversion. As Greece continues to be a rustic with an excellent deal of inherent prejudice, abiding to a system of heteronormative discrimination, her work comes as a very important force...