‘Supporting one another is fundamental’ – in conversation with AnnaMaria Pinaka about teenage bedrooms, intimacy and ‘girly’ symbols
Danai Giannoglou sits down with AnnaMaria Pinaka to talk about her current solo show She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt at ROZENSTRAAT.
When AnnaMaria Pinaka first listened to ‘Teenage Murder’ by the Scottish band Helicon in 2018, she fantasized about the song being performed by a band of princesses with their heads tilted back. Eventually, that fantasy took form. The gig-like performance of the fictional band Baby’s Breath ended-up including more covers than just the initial track and was presented to the public on the 22nd and 24th of May at Het Salon. Together with the film Past where the sky turns (2025) the performance forms the basis of Pinaka’s solo show She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt curated by Madelon van Schie and Angeliki Tzortzakaki at ROZENSTRAAT.
The materialization—or at least the negotiation—of fantasies in their deep contradictory ways, seems to be one of the red-threads in the exhibition. Growing up in Thessaloniki, Greece, Pinaka was, as many young girls, obsessed with princesses. Figures like Princess Sisi or Amalia of Oldenburd, real-life royals whose histories are often sanitized or romanticized, became icons of unattainable glamour and beauty—while their colonial and oppressive legacies were conveniently erased.
However, in this show Pinaka introduces a different type of princess. The carnivalesque princesses, the Princess of the Night, the Ocean or the Rainbow, are princesses that appear to have constructed yet more fluid identities. They allow for contradictions, excess and a multifaceted femininity.
What happens when you return to a childhood space of desire? In this case the desire to be a princess.
‘Now I can enjoy this desire without being burdened by the knowledge that I am an imperfect princess. This desire to be a princess was influenced by fictionalised figures on TV, studying their manners and outfits, wanting to look like them. But I certainly couldn’t look or act like them. So, on the one hand there was this feeling of not being enough (not elegant or thin or blond or heterosexual enough) and too-muchness (in so far as most girls can’t really fit the impossible princess ideal).
However, my aim with this project wasn’t to recover or repair the oppressions and injustices within canonical models of beauty. I didn’t want to treat the desire to be a princess as a symptom of oppression, although it is, and in this sense to claim repair. Rather, I wanted to return to what is left in me of this desire, the most exciting parts of it. I found this in these more abstract costumes such as Princess of the Night or of the Ocean, which I would wear during carnival season in Greece. These figures to me still carry potency in their imaginative potential, a way of being a princess that isn’t based on class injustice but in a capacity to claim one-ness, conquering the cosmos without suppressing the contradictions, tensions, and lacks that underlie our identities.’
Your princesses wear costumes based on Greek carnivalesque styles, make out with women in bars and play hard rock and punk music. It’s as if we are witnessing a passage from childhood to adolescent ‘role-models’. Do you think that these different figures find their space of co-existence in the question: ‘what does it mean to be a girl’?
‘The hard rock and punk women musicians that I saw on TV in the 90s, seemed to defy gender roles, messed with codes of gracefulness and elegance, but were also goofy and playful, uttering politics while claiming silliness as raw and rebellious. They formed communities, bands, and explored creativity together. Encountering and observing these figures was impactful to me during my proto-queer phase.
I was more boyish as a teenager, but by the time I came out and sought out queer communities, I was rather girly and feminine. lt took time to feel okay in those scenes within my femme-ness and the invisibility that sometimes went along within that. In my work and especially in this project, I return to the figure of the princess as an exaggeratedly feminine outer space creature; a silly girl that doesn’t know how to dress for a gay bar.
Symbols of ‘girliness’ such as hearts, mermaids and pinkness are exaggerated gestures, both claiming and questioning queer femme-ness. I see unschooled creativity in the teenage girl’s bedroom – often lonely and dismissed as unimportant and juvenile, but filled with hopes, desires, creative potential, the place where undocumented creative magic happens.’
I see unschooled creativity in the teenage girl’s bedroom – often lonely and dismissed as unimportant and juvenile, but filled with hopes, desires, creative potential, the place where undocumented creative magic happens
In the video work Past where the sky turns, a princess, your sister, flies over Thessaloniki, lands in the city, roams the streets, enters a bar, meets a butch lesbian whose body she licks and eventually falls in an ecstatic grunge orgasm. You told me that this film is a queer love story between the princess, this other woman and Thessaloniki. How important was it to bring the city where you grew up in this body of work, both visually but also conceptually?
‘Thessaloniki in the 90s was very important to me. I was a teenager trying to find out who I was. The first time I fell in love with a girl when I was 16, happened on the streets of this city, running to open air punk gigs, lying on the road and making out, being loud and making a mess. My experience of queerness was pretty closeted at that time and so it expressed itself in the messy punk subculture where boundaries of all kinds were being transgressed. I could kiss a girl in the street and get away with it.
I was also after the urban grunginess that can be found in many Greek and other southern and Balkan cities. I was longing to celebrate what may be seen as imperfect by a more western gaze – sidewalks, stray cats, dusty cars, dents, graffities, the overall culture of existing outdoors, feeling the heat of bodies become one with that of streets and buildings. Greece has always been fetishised and exploited in different ways—currently in a relentless process of gentrification where pretty much everything is bought and resold by real estate agents from richer countries. I suppose I aimed to explore parts of what is magical for me about urban Greece.’
From the presence of the city where you grew up, to the participation of your immediate family and close friends in more than one of your films, and from the teenage room aesthetics of the exhibition, to the documentation or representations of sexual affection and eroticism, your practice has a constant and pervasive sense of intimacy.
‘I really enjoy working with people that are important to me and inspire me. It’s not my aim to ‘represent’ intimacy, eroticism and sexuality in a particular way. I see intimacy and sexuality as a playground of sorts, neither intrinsically happy nor unhappy, successful nor unsuccessful, a place of reworking tensions both within oneself, and between oneself and others. I think my work often invites a scrutinising gaze which asks ‘what is wrong here?’, which I feel discomfort about, but also recognise it as something that the work itself may provoke.
For this project I also worked with numerous people I didn’t know from before, especially for the video Past Where The Sky Turns and the performance Baby’s Breath, for which I worked with a videographer, a music composer, with musicians, music teachers, vocal coaches, choreographers, costume makers and producers for the first time in my life. I find that collaboration, when it works out, is magical and rewarding. It brings me a sense of intimacy that is unique, an experience of being close to others that trespasses our everyday patterns, fears, hesitations. It is also a reminder that almost nothing can be done in solitude, that supporting one another is fundamental, that aligning with each other’s creativity can make explosive miracles happen—such as it was with the band and performance of Baby’s Breath.’
I see similar moments in the exhibition, as attempts to defuse or disorder firm notions of self-hood, and to hold on to the space where identities battle to be formed, wrestle to shift, are fearful or in awe of their own excess, their own potential, their own limitations
Beyond the performance and the film, the exhibition space is filled with drawings on paper and the walls, some children’s accessories, notes, diary entries and posters from your room as a teenager. How do you see the function of these atmospheric, messy ensembles?
There are direct references to childhood, and as you walk through the room they start blurring into adulthood. These reference points—small toys that can be familiar to people who grew up in the late 80s and 90s—smear with works on paper. The watercolours were mostly made between 2021 and 2025; some begin as studies of graceful figures such as princesses and ballerinas, but also of quasi pornographic representations which accumulated in my studio. In my works, these figures stand alone or in ambiguous relationships to one another, in love, in rage, sexually charged, with fluffy animals, or floating naked around fruits, as if in eternal movement or suspension.
While selecting and installing my drawings and watercolour paintings, we aimed to blur hierarchies of high and low art and culture, mess with the boundaries of what is infantile, what is skilled or worked through, or otherwise more determined. For example, the only framed work in the show is a drawing of a princess figure I made when I was 5 years old, Happy Birthday to Me. More so than autobiographical, I see similar moments in the exhibition, as attempts to defuse or disorder firm notions of self-hood, and to hold on to the space where identities battle to be formed, wrestle to shift, are fearful or in awe of their own excess, their own potential, their own limitations.
The exhibition She Keeps Them Warm With Her Skirt is on show until the 26th of July at ROZENSTRAAT
Danai Giannoglou
is a curator and writer
