Christina katrakis biography

Growing up in Europe, I was immersed in the past; living in America I confront modernity. It would appear that I live in the crack between two mutually exclusive worlds: the world of Proustian memory, prescribed canon, rigid formalism, and immutability; and, the world of relativism, eclecticism, mutability, and irreverence to tradition.

Yet straddling these two worlds comes natural to me: I am fascinated by the interdependence between the old and the new, between antiquity and modernity, the European and the American, the timeless and the immediate, and the personal and the political.

I am also intrigued by certain aspects of the post-modern condition: the arbitrary historicizing of the past, compression of the time-space continuum, mythification, sense of fable and play, subjectivism, and irony all inherent in the contemporary cultural milieu.

I am at once a detached observer and an engaged participant of the world, with its kaleidoscopic images, events, cultur