UMBRA

NIKA Project Space presents UMBRA, a solo exhibition by Nika Neelova, opening at our Paris gallery on 14 September. The show looks at how time folds in on itself through objects, memories, and materials – sculptures made of ancient glass, wooden bannisters, and fossilized teeth reflect how knowledge, beliefs, and emotions are passed down, broken, or lost.

 

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“we are but dust and shadows” Horace  

 

Weaving together magic, spiritualism, poetry and materiality into a speculative archeological lore ‘UMBRA’  collapses time and material histories into recursive loops, inviting visitors to wander across vast temporal  distances and scapes. The artefacts and sculptures in the presentation are connected by associative arcs,  histories, invisible material threads, chemical processes and spiritual beliefs. Braiding strands of ancient and  medieval philosophies, the exhibition highlights the migration and interdependence of knowledge and ideas  through time. The works featured in ‘UMBRA’ continue a line of inquiry originating in the artist’s recent  residency and subsequent solo exhibition at the Sir John Soane Museum in London. Paying tribute to the  museum’s layered history and through a period of extensive research at the Warburg Institute, the artist maps  a journey across geological, architectural and human times. Rejecting the idea of linear history, the narratives  unfold simultaneously through different ages loosening the unidirectional grip of chronological time, so that  we are moving both back and forth along time’s continuum.The immersive dark nature of the exhibition  evokes the phantomatic insubstantial nature of memory that appears like a shadow or a dream suggesting the  way remembrance and forgetting are integrally linked with materiality. The world is seen in passing, through  the gaze or touch by touch, manifesting the fluctuation between appearance and disappearance, between  substance and transparency, between the visible and the invisible.  

 

The work ‘Second Sight’ questions the role of observation in the construction of knowledge and through  ancient material practices unveils s secret correspondence between word and world even in the absence of  human presence. The etymology of the Latin word for glass, vitrum, derives more or less directly from the  word voider, signifying a transparent tool for seeing or showing. The handblown sculpture of a ‘glass eye’ is  based on the 18th century eye model from the Josephine in Vienna, which reflects on the historical  development of out understanding of vision alongside the discipline of glassblowing, as the first opticians  and doctors used glass as a material of reference to reconstruct the mechanisms of vision, associating  eyesight with transparency of glass. In fact, many terms used to describe the tunics of the eye were borrowed  from glass making. The site of formation of images – the crystalline lens – is a glass humour that is more  dense than blood, a substance similar to melted glass.  

 

A series of intricate sculptures – the ‘lacrymatories’ – visualise the afterlife of ancient practices as they haunt  and animate later times and cultures. Lacrymatories are Ancient Roman votive glass phials. According to  legend, they were used as tear-catchers to collect the tears of mourners. Once the tears evaporated the period  of mourning was over. Ancient glass was made of three basic ingredients: sand, fluxed with soda or ashes  from salty plants, and made more durable through the presence of lime. Within this triangle of materials, –  the lack of stabilisers such as calcium makes glass soluble in water as it develops the tendency to ‘devitrify’.  Some tear catchers are made replicating ancient dissolving glass recipes and are slowly disappearing,  interacting with the moisture in the air and the artist’s tears contained in them. Their slow dissolution over the  period of the exhibition references the infinite impermanence of all things.  

 

The ‘lemniscate’ series consists of various sculptures made from wooden bannisters reclaimed from old  houses awaiting demolition, and then repurposed and fitted together so that they form an infinite loop. The  handrail is an object moulded specifically to fit in the palm of the hand extruded to an architectural scale.  Never moving but always guiding, it has the ability to connect through touch and lead from one place to  another, choreographing the absent human body into three dimensional space. The old wooden bannisters  were crafted over a hundred years ago by human hands, and spent the next century interacting with other  hands, then were remade by hand again to form infinite loops. Through continuous exposure and contact  with human skin these handrails preserve the memory of human bodies and with it the identities of the  houses they came from; they become portraits of different places, many of which no longer exist. Drawing  upon both the presence and absence of existence, infinitely tied together.  

 

Moving deeper from human and architectural time, the sculpture ‘beghost’ is assembled from decapitated  rose stems are made from fossilised sharks’ teeth, some from extinct species dating over 30 million years old,  set into hardened clay, thereby bridging the futility and short life span of flowers with the vast temporalities  of deep time. The oldest known records of fossilised sharks’ teeth are by Pliny the Elder, who believed that  these triangular objects fell from the sky during lunar eclipses. According to Renaissance accounts, large  triangular fossil teeth often found embedded in rocky formations were believed to be petrified tongues of  dragons and snakes and so were referred to as “tongue stones” which were commonly thought to be a remedy  for various poisons and toxins; they were used in the treatment of snake bites. The inspiration for this piece is  the notable Medieval Rose d’Or from 1330 by Minucchio Jacobi da Siena that can be seen at Musée Cluny in 

Paris. This delicate rose is made up of thin pieces of gold leaf forming stems, petals, and foliage. Thornless,  the rose is an evocation of paradise. 

 

Equating time to the flow and continuum of matter that is never entirely alive nor dead, ‘UMBRA’ interfaces  past, future and present holding diverse times together at once. In ‘The Melancholy of Art’ the philosopher  Sarah Kofman writes: ”There are remainders, ghosts, and phantoms wandering in limbo, things neither living  nor dead, neither sensible nor intelligible, neither present not absent, but rather present in such a way that  presence gives the misleading impression of absence, absent in such a way that an oppressive plenitude  emanates from absence, a plenitude that occupies and entirely takes over the spectator’s gaze.”