Nika Neelova. Tide of Time

The British artist Nika Neelova’s (Moscow, RU, 1987–lives and works in London, UK) sometimes sprawling works transplant us to a world in which time seems out of joint, lending history and stories—of real, but also of fictional characters who have long ceased to exist—material reality in three dimensions.

The artist herself has described this process as a kind of metabolism, a perpetual cycle of decline, collapse, and regeneration. 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 human being.