Renee Doropoulos, 'Yiayia'
35 x 70 x 3 cm 
Digital C-type Print
Edition 1/3+2AP
$1,200
 
This diptych brings together a portrait of my yiayia in hospital near the end of her life with the face of an ancient Greek sculpture. Seen together, they open a space between the intimate and the monumental, where personal memory intersects with cultural history. The work explores themes of fragility, endurance, and the transmission of memory across generations. My yiayia’s image holds the tenderness of familial closeness, yet also speaks to vulnerability, displacement, and the quiet erasures of time. The ancient sculpture, marked but enduring, evokes cultural continuity and the persistence of heritage despite fragmentation. Bringing these images into dialogue reflects my broader practice, which is grounded in the experience of inherited displacement. As a Greek-Australian woman, I am drawn to the tension between assimilation and cultural preservation, between what is carried forward and what risks being lost. The diptych becomes both a record and a meditation — a way of holding onto fragile traces of family and culture, and of acknowledging how individual lives are bound to longer histories of belonging and dislocation. 
 
 
Renee Doropoulos is a Boorloo | Perth based photographic artist whose practice is grounded in the experience of inherited displacement. As a woman born in Australia to Greek migrant heritage, she explores the complexities of growing up between cultures — the tension between migrant assimilation and cultural preservation, belonging and otherness, visibility and erasure. Her work is also driven by a desire to preserve a connection to her heritage, using photography as a means to maintain and honor familial and cultural memory. Renee works across analogue and digital photography to explore how identity is shaped by inherited memory and the emotional landscape of migration. Central to her practice is the intersection between migration and the colonial destruction of the natural landscape, tracing how personal histories of movement and dislocation entwine with broader narratives of place, belonging, and loss. Her work often draws on archival material, portraiture, and intimate imagery to create contemplative spaces where memory and presence converge. Renee has exhibited widely across Western Australia, with group shows at the Perth Centre for Photography, PS Art Space, Mundaring Arts Centre, Moores Building and Fotofreo. Her work has also featured in Terra Firma Magazine.