Guest artist NIKA NEELOVA 

joins Jillian Knipe on this special edition of ART FICTIONS | Culture Exchange which is part of the UK/Australia Season, a partnership between the British Council and the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Nika and I discuss the flow of her cultural story, via poet Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge', first published in 1910. We follow Brigge into the depths of the down and out cityscape as he contemplates his fellow street people, acknowledging his urgency to write while being ill-equipped to do so. 

We go on to discuss the constant country hopping of her childhood. Back then, architectural details became more reliable than the passing parade of friends, schools, neighbourhoods and languages. So she now mines these ideas for her studio practice where architectural details are re-purposed and renewed, creating unexpected sculptural forms, drifting back, forth and around in meaning and time.

Our conversation taps into overlapping past and future, finding modes to retrieve, drifting in and out of focus, slipping through time, panic spasms, hypersensitivity, and reality, experience and stories overlapping to become an indiscriminate montage. 

EXHIBITIONS

2022 '(Everything) is Not What it Seems' NITJA Museum, Oslo

25 Nov 2021 - 7 Jan 2022 'b bl b' Garage off-site project, Moscow

10 Nov 2021 - 30 Jan 2022 'Not Painting' Copperfield, London

22 Oct 2021 - Dec 2022 'Silt' Brighton CCA

11 Sep 2021 - 20 Nov 2021  'One of Many Fragments : Edward Allington and Nika Neelova' New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury

NIKA NEELOVA

nikaneelova.com

instagram nikaneelova

ARTISTS

Ana Mendieta

Andrei Tarkovsky (film director)

Barbara Hepworth

Emma Cousin

Eva Hesse

Eva Rothschild

Fra Angelico 

Holly Hendry

Jane Hayes Greenwood

Louise Bourgeois

Phyllida Barlow

Rachel Whiteread

Piero della Francesco

BOOKS & WRITERS

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 'The Mushroom at the End of the World'

Annie Ernaux 'The Years'

Donna Haraway 'Staying with the Trouble' 

Edmund de Waal 'The Hare with the Amber Eyes'

Henrik Ibsen (playwright)

Maggie Nelson 'The Argonauts'

Manuel DeLanda 'A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History'

Margaret Atwood 'The Testaments'

Martin Heidegger 'The Basic Problems of Phenomenology'

Max Frisch 'Man in the Holocene'

Jean Paul Sartre 'Nausea'

Ocean Vuong 'On Earth We're Briefly Beautiful'

Rainer Maria Rilke 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' 

Susan Sontag 'The Volcano Lover' 

Tibor Fischer 'The Collector Collector'

Tom McCarthy 'Remainder'

Tom McCarthy 'Satin Island'

Virginia Woolf 'The Waves'