14 Dec 2015

Nika Neelova at Vigo London

Faults / Folds / Falls
Nika Neelova
16.12.15 – 23.1.16

'Life is not life but rock rearranging itself under the sun'
Manuel DeLanda

Vigo Gallery presents Faults / Folds / Falls, the second solo show by Nika Neelova at the gallery.

Faults / Folds / Falls comprises a series of sculptures and a large sculptural installation that, the exhibition imagines, inhabit a post-human age. It is a world in which human needs and definitions have almost completely disappeared. They remain only as a vestigial memory, visibly encoded in the forms of the sculptures, which seem to have evolved, over countless generations, out of a number of common functional items once designed by humans; office chairs, crowd-control barriers, IKEA stools and cabinets.

In the fictional space presented by the exhibition these objects, freed from the tyranny of human needs, take center stage. They exude a powerful presence within the space and appear to be engaged in dynamic, communicative relations with each other… some form of exchange is occurring, but one that we could never fully understand, in the way that plant communication will always remain, essentially, mysterious to humans.

Symbolically using geological terminology (faults, folds, folds, each being different geological phenomena), Neelova, imaginatively speaking, has stepped outside the Holocene and radically shifted the temporal frames of reference within which we would locate art. These works, conceptually, blur the definitions of sculpture, furniture, architecture and nature.

Just as British philosopher John Gray argues that technology is not a human invention, but a phenomena that we as a species temporarily co-exist and interact with, so the elements that we prize within our experience and understanding of art, design and architecture, among them colour, material, form, etc. are all qualities and properties latent in the material make-up of the world. Long after we are gone, many of these properties will remain, although always changing, and they will continue to combine and recombine creating new forms and phenomena, until the universe dies.

Neelova's art is a dream about this future space and time.

Nika Neelova (b. 1987, Moscow, Russia) lives and works in London.
Nika graduated from BA at the Royal Art Academy in The Hague and from MA Sculpture at the Slade School of Art in London. She was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize, the Land Security Prize Award, the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award and was the winner of the Saatchi New Sensations. 
Recent solo exhibitions include: '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;Recent group shows include: 'Archeologia e Architettura', Fondazione 107, Turin; 'Brand New Second Hand', Vigo Gallery;  'Lichtspiele', Museum Biedermann, Germany; 'Warp&Woof', The Hole, New York; 'Great Men Die Twice', Mario Sequeira Gallery, Portugal; 'Gaiety is most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union', Saatchi Gallery, London; 'White Nights', curated by Marat Gelmann, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia.