Taki Bibelas

Taki Bibelas - Water & Sacred Shores

Biography - Taki Bibelas (extended)

Born in Athens and raised in Canada, Taki Bibelas is a photographer and filmmaker living between the Basque Country and Paris. His practice combines cinematic aesthetics, visual narrative and technical experimentation; he frequently uses double exposures made in-camera and changes of scale to open up a space between the real and the imagined. Bibelas investigates how the body inhabits the landscape and the elements - especially water and the shore - as sites of memory, transformation and transcendence.

His photographs have been published in Vogue Hommes International, Numéro, Vanity Fair, Mixte, Italian Marie Claire and L'Officiel. His documentary The Still Point won three international awards and, in 2014, he presented his first short film at the Cannes Film Festival (Short Film Corner). He regularly teaches photography and film classes at Gobelins, Paris. His exhibitions include the Musée de Guéthary (several projects, 2003-2024), the Musée Basque in Bayonne (2015), Escape Gallery Bordeaux (2009), Woah Gallery Lima and Frankfurt (2008-2009), Dulap Gallery Lausanne (2006), Carpender Gallery London (2005) and a presentation at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2004).

His work is guided by an attention to time - its drift, its suspension and its wake - and by an ethic of tenderness towards that which appears and disappears in front of the camera.

Project - Sacred Shores

Sacred Shores thinks of the meeting line between sand, ocean and sky as a threshold rather than a border. Through double exposures and elastic horizons, figures and landforms overlap; orientation slips and scale wavers. The shore becomes a state of mind where the visible and the sensible coincide, a transcendence without spectacle. The series reflects on nostalgia, the passage of time and the serene amazement of the suspended instant. The images retain a margin of indeterminacy that invites the viewer to complete the scene with their own memory of coasts, tides and weather.

Project - Water

In Water, Bibelas delves into the liquid element as a space of dissolution and sensorial memory. Bodies float, blur and protect themselves; identity becomes permeable, alternating between freedom and disappearance. The series works with matter, light and abstraction to show how water registers contact, breath and emotion-how it refracts self-image as much as it reflects it. Far from aquatic prowess, Water is concerned with the intimate: the slow drift of a shoulder beneath the surface, the veil of bubbles, a scattering field of light. The result is a meditation on shelter, surrender, and the porous boundary between body and world.