For artwork lovers, there is just one strategy to do all of it throughout the ever-growing checklist of artwork weeks: cloning. Nonetheless, since we’re not there but, the one choice appears to be a strict choice of exhibits to attend among the many plethora of exhibitions. In Paris final month, amid the swirl of latest voices, main retrospectives and a number of artwork festivals throughout arrondissements, I selected one which allowed me to decelerate and really see: “UMBRA,” Nika Neelova’s solo exhibition, on view via December 19 at NIKA Venture Area in Komunuma. (The gallery cluster in Romainville has turn into a hotspot for artwork exterior Paris, house to a number of the metropolis’s most fun galleries.)
Moving into the deep blue of the gallery, one enters a dimension the place time appears to have stopped behaving. Neelova’s works seem like giant, unusual animals—or maybe relics that bridge historical ritual and concrete residue. On one facet of the house, vitrines show glass containers harking back to Roman funerary urns. On the opposite, historical stair bannisters twist into loops replicating the infinity image. The exhibition’s title—Latin for “shadow”—evokes the very essence of the artist’s world: half-visible, partly erased. What as soon as was and what could be once more converge in the potential of one thing but to come back.
For Neelova, whose observe has lengthy explored the fabric afterlives of objects, “UMBRA” marks a deepening of what she calls “reverse archaeology.” Somewhat than excavating the previous to protect it, she performs with decay, forcing time to loop again on itself. “Time is folded. It collapses and expands; it’s non-linear,” she tells Observer, slowly caressing one among her handrail sculptures. “Actually, my installations are processes caught mid-transformation. For me, sculpture is simply the short-term hardening of a move.” That’s what her work speaks of—if not the hardening of a thought, then actually the materialization of a move of reasoning.
A petite, fashionable lady carrying a gaminish blue beret, Neelova permits herself to be carried by the stitching of invisible patterns throughout disciplines and human realms. In her considering, she strikes simply from alchemy to ecology, from etymology to entropy. “I actually imagine within the consciousness of matter,” she says. “Every part has its personal rhythm, its personal company. Wooden breathes, glass cracks, metallic corrodes. Issues transfer even once we can’t see them.”
This conviction—that matter remembers—underlies the exhibition’s centerpiece: sculptures created from handrails salvaged from demolished staircases. The wooden, principally mahogany imported throughout the colonial interval, has handed via numerous palms during the last hundred years. “The handrail is the assembly level between the human physique and the structure of house,” Neelova explains. “It’s molded to the palm, extruded to architectural scale. When it’s touched, it collects microscopic bits of pores and skin, the DNA of tons of, possibly hundreds, of individuals. So each piece turns into a collective portrait.”
She gestures to 1 loop composed of three spiraling flights of stairs from St. James’s tube station in London, now twisted right into a type that remembers each the infinity image and the ouroboros, the alchemical serpent devouring its tail. “The ouroboros is about everlasting recurrence, the cyclicality of life on earth,” she says. “These works lead you on an infinite cycle of repetition. They talk about continuity, the move of matter via time.”
The handrails stay unpolished, their scars and fractures intact. The artist invitations me to the touch them and really feel the worn grooves the place palms from individuals lengthy gone as soon as rested, the stains of a long time of human passage. “It’s not possible not to think about the colonial trajectories of the wooden itself, as soon as a part of bushes that stood for hundreds of years in South American forests earlier than being carved into the home narratives of Europe,” says Neelova. “I like the concept of tapping into bigger flows that started earlier than me and can proceed lengthy after.”
There’s something each deeply human and cosmic in the best way Neelova describes her work. She typically speaks of contact as a type of data and of sculpture as a gesture prolonged via time. “While you reassemble a staircase, you choreograph the absent physique into house. Within the absence of individuals, their ghosts stay as vestigial reminiscence,” she displays. This sense of haunting runs all through “UMBRA,” the place presence and disappearance intertwine. “As soon as objects are liberated from perform, they purchase new, summary meanings. Absence and presence are infinitely tied collectively; it relies upon which facet of the item you take a look at.”
In a single nook, a cluster of small, tough glass bottles gleams. They’re Neelova’s lacrimatories—glass flasks modeled after historical Roman tear catchers, believed to accompany the useless into the afterlife. She reconstructed them utilizing glassmaking recipes uncovered throughout analysis on the Warburg Institute in London. “I wished to make glass the best way it was first made,” she says. “Sand combined with ashes, solidified with lime. With out fashionable stabilizers, the glass turns into soluble in
Every flask, she explains, accommodates her personal tears. Over the course of the exhibition, they progressively whiten and disintegrate, interacting with moisture within the air till they return to mud. “It’s a metamorphosis cycle, from strong to liquid to air. A time-measuring machine, like in historical Rome. When the tears evaporated, mourning was over. I like that it’s about disappearance; the work enforces its personal undoing.”
This concept of air as materials—the invisible act of respiration made everlasting—echoes via lots of her items, together with a set of black-glass eyes impressed by 18th-century medical fashions. The items resemble obsidian, absorbing and reflecting mild, showing directly historical and futuristic, like a cross between a Vietnamese lacquer vase and a Star Wars prop.
The notion of imaginative and prescient and notion developed additional throughout her residency at Sir John Soane’s Museum, the place Neelova turned fascinated by how mirrors and reflections altered house. “Soane constructed a home that’s like an organism, and he crammed it with mirrors, ruins, fragments. You by no means know the place you’re; it’s virtually as if the gaze detaches from the physique,” she remembers. “It looks like being inside somebody’s consciousness.”
This concept of partial sight—of perceiving via shadow—informs “UMBRA.” “There’s an previous English phrase, mayan, which means eyes partially closed,” she explains. “It’s the place ‘thriller’ comes from. Seeing the world with half-closed eyes means that you can understand its strangeness. Generally, if you see much less, you perceive extra.”
Although analysis and hypothesis underpin Neelova’s observe, her strategy is very bodily. “I don’t use any digital applications,” she says with fun. “Everybody’s making artwork via A.I. now, however I wouldn’t even know map a form on a pc! I favor working by hand, amassing the errors. After I collaborate with glassblowers, I inform them, ‘Are you able to simply blow it unsuitable?’ As a result of it’s within the errors that the work finds its life.” What fascinates her is just not correcting these errors however permitting them to coexist. “Historical past is stuffed with misunderstandings. Every interpretation leaves a hint, similar to sediment. I like that chain of which means folding again on itself.”
That insistence on imperfection hyperlinks Neelova to artists who see entropy not as decay however as creation. She references thinker Reza Negarestani’s essay Undercover Softness, which describes “the politics of decay as malleable structure.” “He writes that decay reconstructs itself within the means of its personal destruction,” she says. “I really like that concept that the undoing is itself a generative act.”
This view has at all times belonged to Neelova, even earlier than she knew she wished to be an artist. As a toddler, she collected stones and shells. “I used to be fascinated by how a lot time is held in a small fragment. You’ll be able to journey via time by touching it.” That early fascination has matured into a creative language the place supplies themselves are storytellers. “As an artist, I really feel like a conduit, a facilitator. My work at all times begins with one thing discovered. It’s about persevering with what already exists,” says Neelova.
Exiting NIKA Venture Area into the damp Parisian climate, via the crimson brick cluster of galleries in Komunuma, I felt momentarily at peace—my want to clone myself and attend three openings directly briefly glad. The artist’s phrases lingered in my thoughts: “Every part is consistently undoing itself. There’s no remaining type, simply fixed transformations.” I contemplated this for a couple of minutes earlier than descending the steps on the Romainville–Carnot metro. The practice arrived at full velocity; the mechanical doorways opened with a loud metallic snap. Linear time—the world of matter—had began over again.
Extra in Artists
