Cristina Planas

Cristina Planas is a Spanish-Canadian artist who studied in London/United Kingdom and was born in Montreal/Canada. 

Her chosen fields include moving-image material, photography and installation, and she pursues an expansive performance practice derived from her experience of becoming an international boxing champion. Working in and through physical disciplines, she explores the body as a store of knowledge. She both explores and encounters the Self, parts of which she reconstructs and refracts through dance and character work. Her intergenerational narrative investigations allow her to reconfigure the past in acts that are future-creating. 

Working through personal and public histories, her video works explore memory, legacy, archive and intergenerational narratives. She is interested in how those legacies affect present-day image-making modalities, and how these in turn affect the construction of our Selves and self-images. Exploring tensions between the Self and the image, she questions the social and systemic roots of past and current production modalities. 

With the support of the Canada Arts Council and Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Quebec she is currently developing a feature-length expanded cinema project at the intersection of live performance, filmmaking and installation. In 2020, she created Espace Brutale, a project space and online platform for the creation and dissemination of art and related topics. 

Previous works include a 9-angle online performance titled The Fool’s Confession created live on Zoom on April 1, 2020. She has developed a series of solo performances entitled The Fissure, performed at COB Gallery, London (2018). In April 2020, her video poem Ode from Academy Street was selected by Jesse Darling, and a second piece 9.7 Billion Of Us was selected by Misha De Ridder at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen/Germany. 

Past shows include Art Was Just A Substitute For The Internet (2021); Peregrination (2019); online pavilions at TheWrong Biennale, an installation in NEW WORK PART III: SUBJECT, COB Gallery in London (2018), installations in Michele Lamy’s, Forever Young exhibition at JOYCE Gallery in Paris/France (2018) and LAMYLAND at Selfridges, London (2018). 

She is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, London.