Nika Neelova. Cascade

The British artist Nika Neelova’s (Moscow, RU, 1987; lives and works in London, UK) sprawling installations and other works transport us to what feels like a world unto itself and out of time. She revisits history and the stories of people both real and fictional who have long ceased to exist, lending them material reality in three dimensions.

The artist herself describes this process as a kind of metabolism, a recurring cycle of decline, collapse, and renewal. Her works are like artifacts that exert a powerful pull, carrying the beholders along on a tide of time; meanwhile, they are very much committed to the present in their formal-aesthetic modesty and the clinical perspective they frame on human civilization.

Neelova wants her art to inspire viewers to experience the idea of time, which she conceives of as nonlinear, stimulating their sense for the poetic and playfulness, their inquisitiveness and curiosity. Working exclusively with found objects and materials, she has a remarkable gift for scrutinizing perfectly ordinary things from a wide variety of perspectives and presenting them in novel ways, bringing out their tactile qualities, materiality, and provenance, their place in time and the interdependence that connects them to humans.

Works by other important artists, including Isa Genzken, Maria Bartuszová, Marisa Merz, Hans Haacke, Heinz Frank and many others, are integrated into the presentation of the exhibition as if in a loose network of relationships. In this way, the collection objects of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the Salzburg Museum and the Mining and Gothic Museum Leogang become part of a utopian world idea.