Pleasure Disobedience presents a curated chapter for Women by Women at the PhotoVogue Festival, bringing together moving-image works by female and queer directors that explore intimacy, desire, self-representation and resistance.
Curated by Sofia Kouloukouri and Alexios Seilopoulos, P&D features works by pro-sex feminist creators Nan Goldin with All By Myself and Romy Laure with Romy Laure…Et Le Secret De L’Homme Meuble, where still photographs in a slideshow or a silent photo montage, define the self-portrait as documentation or as a device for fiction, revealing intimate moments of love, loss, and surprising power shifts. P&D also features works where attire becomes a political statement and an element of female agency. Vivienne Dick’s series of real time unedited portraits of punk icons in Guerillère Talks is as cinematically unapologetic as its very protagonists, not unlike May Ziadé’s Neo Nahda exploring how female crossdressers in 20’s Egypt, reshuffle the cards of expected gender compliance in search of a peer community and safe spaces.
We would like to thank the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), LUX Distribution UK and all the artists for their precious help and trust.
A slideshow installation, featuring 83 35mm slide transparencies accompanied by a soundtrack of Eartha Kitt s song of the same name. The work serves as a personal autobiography, presenting the artist s life from childhood to adulthood through images of intimate moments, love, loss, and treatment for addiction, forming a part of her ongoing photographic practice that explores relationships, identity, and subcultural communities.
Part of the Pleasure Disobedience film program, curated by Sofia Kouloukouri Alexios Seilopoulos.
Photographer and performer Romy Alizee and her partner writer and actress Laure Giapicconi have been creating what they call ‘immoral tales’ since 2019. Using only black and white still images this silent photo-cinematic tale tells the story of a libertine lesbian couple whose daily life is disrupted by the sudden and mysterious apparition of an uninvited guest: a man.
Part of the Pleasure Disobedience film program, curated by Sofia Kouloukouri Alexios Seilopoulos.
Vivienne Dick, the ‘quintessential no wave filmmaker’, arrived in New York in 1975. Guerillere talks is her first film, an homage to Monique Wittig’s seminal work on all female communities Les Guérillères, it uses Super-8 film to profile punk performers such as Lydia Lunch, Pat Place and Adele Bertei in real time and without any editing in a sort of screen test in which the camera is co-conspirator rather than voyeur. Vivienne Dick offers us a sequence of reckless and iconic women, almost contemptuously posing in the backdrop of a deteriorating social system, from which they sprang out but seem to transcend.
Part of the Pleasure Disobedience film program, curated by Sofia Kouloukouri Alexios Seilopoulos.
May Ziadé is a London-based, French-Lebanese filmmaker, filmworker, and co-founder of Other People’s Films. The film follows Mona, a young woman in London who finds archive photographs of Arab women cross-dressing in the 1920s. Somewhere between her fantasies and reality, she starts a feverish journey of uncovering lost histories and her own identity. Through a coming-of-age narrative, the film explores the euphoric relationship those who are marginalised create with images and symbols, and how archive images can be a portal for the world of inner projections, creating meaning and grounding one s identity.
Part of the Pleasure Disobedience film program, curated by Sofia Kouloukouri Alexios Seilopoulos.
Sofia Kouloukouri is a visual artist, performer, and art historian. Through endurance and narration, her work deals with literal and affective weights as a feminine heritage originating in the education of girls, myth and religious doctrines. Kouloukouri holds Masters degrees in cinema studies (AUTH, Thessaloniki), Visual Arts (Edhea, Sierre), and Art History (UNIGE, Genève). Her writings have been published by Nero Editions, Miami Books and The Art Newspaper. Her first book Artistes Femmes et Travail du Sexe was published by L Harmattan in 2025. Kouloukouri s work has been presented among others at : Bourse de Commerce / Collection Pinault, Paris; Centre Wallonie- Bruxelles, Paris; Roman Road, London; Théâtre du Grütli, Genève; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Buenos Aires (MACBA), Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts (MCBA), Lausanne; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhague. In 2024 Kouloukouri was part of ORGANISMO: Art in Applied Critical Ecologies a research program led by TBA21 and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. In 2025 Kouloukouri was selected by the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST) for a residency at the Cité internationale des Arts, Paris.
Alexios Seilopoulos is a brand strategist and creative director. He is the founder of the London-based creative agency Apropos, where he has led high-profile campaigns for governments, brands, institutions and NGOs, combining strategic thinking with powerful storytelling in film, photography and design.
His curatorial projects on LGBTQ+ history, urban identity and social justice include a panel discussion at the Barbican Centre on Art Queer Resistance with writer and ACT UP founding member Sarah Schulman and photographer Sunil Gupta (London, 2023), and the Pleasure Disobedience film program (Athens, 2024 and 2025).
He holds an MA from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He lives between London and Athens.
