FROM MOSCOW (VIA PARIS, HAAG AND LONDON) TO ULVIK
NIKA NEELOVA
[Residency period 08.-09.2015]
Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2010, the now 28- year old artist has been represented in distinguished international collections, institutions and art shows, such as Gaiety is most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union, Saatchi Gallery London; Russian London, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia; Lichtspiele, Museum Biedermann, Germany; The Crisis Commission, Somerset House& Christie’s London; Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award Exhibition, London; Warp&Woof, The Hole Gallery, New York; I lean to you numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here, Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam; Fragments Shored against the Ruins, Vigo Gallery, London; Great Men Die Twice, Mario Sequeira Gallery, Portugal and so forth.
Artist Statement
- Since I was born in USSR in 1987, I have moved countries every five years of my life, carrying fragments of my cultural and historical heritage and reintroducing them into new places until they stopped being recognizable. The work I have been producing to date was recreating a post-industrial, post-globalization environment abandoned by humans and reclaimed by nature. It has shaped into a series of works based on unweaving the architecture of the living space and depicting it in a state of arrested physical change, susceptible to the forces of gravity, entropy and decay, featuring the fall, the architectural suicide of recognizable structures.
Situated on the threshold between the architecture of memory and the architecture of ruination, the works introduce fragility as a quality of resistance to destruction, attempting to sketch the figure of the ruin coming up over the designs and architectures of our time. Globalization has made the world more distributed, dissipated, fluid and complex. In the context of these ever shifting grounds one either follows the instinct to preserve and return to what is known or to evolve into a new unanchored condition. It is an on-going conflict of opposing principles attempting to coexist. Following a similar assumption, the work is either pointing to an imagined hypothetical future or attempting to return to some distant primordial origins and reverse the history of evolution. Either way, it is never fully addressing the present, it exists somewhere in the suburbs of this present moment.
[www.nikaneelova.com]
Nika Neelova stayed in Hordaland Aug.-Sept. 2015. During her stay, shel hold a presentation at Ulvik Brakanes skule, and an event in Ulvik.