Paola Revenioti is a Greek transgender artist, activist and a prostitute. This is the first UK exhibition of Revenioti’s work and will include an installation of pages from her magazine Kraximo, which was published between 1986-1992, as well as a selection of her photography taken at the same time.

 

In the 80s Revenioti published the influential trans-anarchist fanzine Kraximo, which she funded through her prostitution. The magazine featured articles on gay and trans rights, interviews with eminent poets and writers (including Dinos Christianopoulos and Félix Guattari), as well as controversial photographs of her encounters with boys. She also organised and financed the first gay pride in Greece, which took place in Athens in 1992. Revenioti is still active, working on documentary projects (The Paola Project Team) and publishing her writings and views on current political and social developments in Greece through the Internet.

 

In January 2013 Breeder Gallery in Athens, Greece hosted an exhibition of Paola’s photographic and video work curated by Andreas Angelidakis. That was the first time her work was exhibited publicly and by an art institution.

 

The exhibition at White Cubicle Toilet Gallery focuses on the time when Revenioti was publishing Kraximo and aims to introduce Revenioti to an international audience, offering a rare glimpse of her groundbreaking work. Revenioti’s choice of pink for her fanzine was an overt reference to the pink triangle used in Nazi concentration camps to distinguish homosexual male prisoners. This was one of the many aspects that expressed her revolutionary ethos at the time, but also shows her continuing relevance in the contemporary political climate in Greece.

 

In her photography, Revenioti’s subjects are her lovers and friends, encountered in flats and on the streets of Athens. Shot in black and white, they capture the aesthetic and the angst of the period. A step away from pornography, her approach is fuelled with passion and energy, displaying sensitivity and melancholy, evident in the unaffected faces of the boys, their provocative poses and in the imaginative use of light and shadows.