Biography

Severine Costa (b. 1990, in Kanaky New Caledonia), is an artist based in London UK.

Working mainly with installation, Costa engages in a multi-disciplinary questioning of the intersections of touch, trauma, memory and identity. Her practice currently focuses on mental health discourse and how it is influenced and shaped by neo liberal and colonial ideologies. Growing up in Kanaky New Caledonia and living for ten years in Aotearoa New Zealand, She witnessed the many ways in which both islands’ populations are still grappling with the challenges of their respective decolonisation processes. Costa has used her practice to research how mental health expectations and stereotypes have been influenced by the toxic “Pioneer spirit” narrative and how it participates in the erasure of local experiences of intergenerational trauma and grief.

Interested in the kinaesthetic language of fluidity, she develops projects using water in conjunction with materials such as plumbing pipes, sinks, paper and paint to address concepts around emotional fitness, resilience and perseverance within rigid and  destructive structures. 

Costa graduated with an MFA from Massey University College of Creative Art (Aotearoa NZ), 2021.

She previously obtained a BVA from the Otago polytechnic School of Art in 2014. Between 2015 and 2017 she worked with the feminist artist run gallery and collective Fresh n’ Fruity, an initiative by Hana Pera Aoake and Mya Morrison-Middleton