Often utilising reclaimed architectural materials, Nika Neelova is interested in the way materials and architecture influence our sense of time and place. Bypassing straightforward means of fabrication, her work is concerned with finding modes of retrieving and revealing information that is already there and the multiplicities of histories concealed within it as a way of finding and imagining evidence of human pasts through inanimate things. The sculptures are often created by employing tactics of 'reverse archaeology' - considering an alternative reading of human history by examining found objects and architectural debris, and transforming them beyond functionality. In these works the human body and touch remains as a vestigial memory. Drawing arcs between different time periods and disciplines the sculptures form part of larger cycles, temporarily arrested in their current form. Neelova attributes high importance to material transformations often inspired by the latent potency immanent in the materials. The sculptures are often focused on the conversions involved in translating existing objects into other mediums, decoding and recoding their purposes, enacting the processes that were used to shape them, altering their internal structures and liberating objects from their meaning. Matter precedes the object, despite being inevitably tied to it and the processes Neelova borrows and amplifies to shape the work, whether entropic, chemical or manual, are usually processes that have been previously affecting matter naturally. Her installations are often conceived of as speculative archeological sites, unearthing various debris and salvaged materials from lived-in environments, reconciling recognisable day-to-day objects with meditations on geological flows and deep time. This manifests itself in works that hover between the organic and the synthetic; between the remembered collective past and an attempt to glimpse into the future. Unearthed layers expose mutated ruins and explore the fluidity of matter through parallel, contradictory and disparate timelines. Her vast body of work, exploring how the human body, the architectural space and the geology of the earth intertwine, touches on the occurring ecological catastrophe, and the anticipated anthropocene, balancing the tension between human bodies and human-created environments and their understood, but potentially mutated inherent power structure.
ARTIST CV