San Sebastián. Performance, Video art, Installations.
Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country, specializing in Painting and Sculpture (1985 - 1990), she completed her training at the Arteleku art center along with various stays in Berlin or Dusseldorf.
Itziar Okariz operates with the redefinition of the concept of performativity. Music and poetry are inspiring disciplines in her artistic production, where she approaches performance as an event; without emphasizing its theatrical aspect, trying to resignify it. To do this, she develops actions that question language, the construction of the body and its relationship with public and private spaces. In this context, she is interested in recognizing resistance to the norm, and analyzing it as a critical space, as well as a place where violence can be exercised.
She shows concern for the construction / deconstruction of identities, in addition to questioning about sex and gender. She is interested in decontextualization as a tool since it allows generating a direct and effective analysis of the construction of something in relation to the context that generates it and to which it belongs.
The ideological space that interests her in reference to the public and the private is ambiguous, since it allows to generate questioning and free reflection. Her work is based on careful analysis, rather than on authoritarian political affirmation, although she does not forget that she starts from a given political space and not from another.
She uses the body as a battlefield and dissent from those culturally constructed biopolitical conventions, manipulating and altering any naturalized vision that may refer to it. His field of action includes the morphology of objects, the skin as an artifact, the fragmented body and the body gesture. The latter sees it in an unnatural way, as a social fiction linked to repetition, being understood as a mechanism that builds identity and normalizes behavior.
For Okariz, identity arises from that reiteration and accumulation of norms where power operates to generate a stable and mature identity. However, the very action of repeating ends up showing its fragility, so it deconstructs some resources that produce and normalize our behaviors, to alter their structure and show that it is impossible to reproduce something analogous.
Her actions acquire open forms and challenge the public to subvert those conventions that we have internalized and that go unnoticed, offering us content that occupies the space of a void that has been previously created, in a dialectical game between the visible and the legible that presents multiple readings.
