Katerina Moschou
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25 October – 6 December 2025
Rooted in the simplicity of everyday moments, How to Drive reflects on a place historically distant to women yet deeply familiar to the artist: a car repair workshop. Her father, a mechanic with a passion for classic Italian cars, provides both the setting and the starting point for this study.
Spending hours in his workshop in the centre of Athens, Moschou observes gestures of care: the lifting of a hood, the touch of fabric, the unveiling of form. Turning the gaze inward, she captures the mechanical parts and materials–soft and raw–their juxtaposition and continuities. Then, behind the wheel herself, the car becomes both stage and vessel; a bounded space where the body performs small, repetitive movements, almost unconsciously. The body becomes an extension of the interior space, its fragments of posture and rhythm composing silent rituals that navigate an act as automated, and seemingly mundane, as driving.
Many aspects of our daily lives remain unnoticed and unrecorded—driving among them. “Once learned, there is no need for heroic gestures. Instead, one must simply succumb to repetition.” the artist notes. Once learned, these motions no longer require thought; they simply happen, quietly shaping our sense of place and time.
There are moments—paused at a red light, hands resting on the steering wheel—when time seems to suspend. We become both observer and observed, enclosed in a small metallic chamber, moving and waiting. While driving, we develop a tactile relationship with the surrounding materials, feeling the car as a membrane between outside and inside, between motion and presence. This dialogue extends into the sculptural works, where the car’s exterior and interior materials are reimagined: metal suggesting safety and dynamism, fabric evoking comfort and bodily protection. Using parts sourced from her father’s workshop such as windshields, seat belts, felt covers, the artist carves, pierces, and weaves them, transforming functional components into poetic forms.
How to Drive examines driving as a practice of memory and movement, and the car as a vessel where motion becomes ritual. Within a space traditionally coded as masculine, Moschou reclaims and transforms it into a field of observation. Echoing Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the work reorients attention toward unheroic narratives—often connected to women’s experiences. Through her photographs and sculptures, Moschou translates the act and environment of driving into form and material. In How to Drive, the car is no longer about grand destinations or speed, but becomes a space to embrace what is most often overlooked.
Text by Lida Koutromanou
Curated by Lida Koutromanou | Photography: Andrew Anetopoulos
“How to drive” @Foto-gen Gallery, Wroclaw
28th June - 29th September 2024
The automotive industry is not a woman-friendly space. From the design stage of a new car to everyday participation in traffic to the sexist, belittling verbal layer. The risk of injury in a car crash is higher in women than in men because of the shorter height, they -women, sit in more upright and closer to the steering wheel. That’s why they are at risk of head injuries caused by airbag. In addition the women’s neck muscles are weaker than those of men, and they are more likely to injure their arms, legs, joints, feet and abdomens. Until recently these differences were almost completely ignored during crash tests. Although dummies that reproduce female anatomy are used, but their construction comes from 70’s and 80’s and do not reflect the specificity of the female body quite well. It is only just in the last year and a half that more refined phantoms have been used, considering the statistical damage to a woman’s body in an accident translating the results into their construstion.
“How to drive” has its beginning in this world so alien to the female body, the border of which Katerina Moschou crosses on several levels. The portal to it is the artist’s father’s car repair shop - a space she has known for years but that has always seemed distant. Staying there, photographing cars, staying close to them, she has crossed the border of a community other than her own, and created her own connections in it. Thanks to touch she has become, in a sense, one with the devices and materials previously unavailable.
The entire space of the exhibition is a reproduction of this gesture, it is tactile. The photographs and objects also build an arrangement which plays with what is visible and what is invisible. The lines and shapes make up synthetic sketches of car silhouettes, but the context corporeality is still present. While driving, the person driving the car repeats a specific sequence of gestures almost unconsciously. Her body fuses with the elements of the vehicle’s equipment which determine the movements but are also designed to correspond with the shape of the human silhouette. The body in the car is inscribed in a small closed space, where it performs a rhythmical dance. Moschou has translated it into a sequence in a photobook. It was developed in the exhibition space with the use of a slide projector. Its mode of operation, repetition, and image overlapping and even the sounds it makes bring to mind what happens in the car. Just like a mixture of specific synthetic fragrances present at the exhibition. All this together reminds us that driving a car is a complex relationship between what is visible, desirable and disappearing.
Text by Paweł Bąkowski
This project was co-financed
from the budget of Lower Silesia Voivodeship
Curator: Paweł Bąkowski
Visual identification, motion: Olga Krzywiecka, Paweł Bąkowski
Accompanying program: Aleksandra Tews
Translations: Marek Balicki
Digital prints: QPrint
Exhibition realization: Michał Perucki
Photo credits:Jerzy Wypych
Honorary patronage: Embassy of Greece in Warsaw
Exhibition partner: Mood Scent Bar
Media patrons: Zoetrope Athens, Kwartalnik FOTOGRAFIA,
Contemporary Lynx, TVP3 Wroclaw, Radio RAM, Radio Wrocław, Radio Wrocław Kultura,
Miesięcznik Odra, Pismo Artystyczne Format