Nika Neelova: UMBRA

NIKA Project Space presents UMBRA, a survey of recent works by Nika Neelova, the internationally acclaimed London-based conceptual sculptor. The exhibition follows two institutional solo presentations of the artist—at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg—and brings together works from several series that participate in the same line of inquiry first developed during her residency at the Soane Museum in 2024. During this residency, Neelova delved into the nature of human experience, its frailty and temporality, and the ways it relates to objects, materials, and the architecture of space. These questions had shaped her practice for some years, but Sir John Soane’s Museum became the place where she could explore them in relation to spirituality, poetry, and magic. Studying the ways in which Soane entwined his personal history, his obsession-like love for Eliza, and even his physical condition with the house, as well as with the broader history of humanity, inspired in Neelova a new way of looking and a new approach to creation.

Delving into the history and etymology of language surrounding the term “vision”, Neelova returned to the medium originally linked to the act of seeing and the eye itself: glass. For the artist, through glass, vision acquires the materiality of a physical object, akin to an act of creation for the sculptor. With this body of work, she attempts to solidify the gesture of vision while simultaneously emphasizing the historical connection between glass and the act of seeing. The work that personifies this concept most directly is Second Sight—a sculpture inspired by the anatomical model of the eye. It encapsulates both the precision and the completeness of human gesture of sight, as well as the abstract notion of the threshold between inner and outer worlds. Representing the doorway through which one perceives reality, while holding the entire universe in its spherical form, the eye becomes the ultimate connection between nature and humanity. The artist also connects Second Sight to her experience at Sir John Soane’s Museum, where “the gaze almost detaches from yourself and starts to wander on its own, becoming an independent vision and an independent faculty.” Like every creation of Neelova’s, Second Sight is intended to initiate a dialogue with the viewer. Built to be opened like its historical counterpart, to be physically invaded, the sculpture invites physical engagement: its inner substance can be revealed and studied, satisfying the curiosity of an explorer. Yet the investigation is meant to go beyond form into the process of creation itself.

For another work executed in glass, Lacrimatories, Neelova worked in collaboration with Studio Barreda to replicate ancient glassmaking techniques, combining sand from the Basilicata region in Italy, soda and the ashes of plants from saline environments. The phantoms of living organisms embedded in these jewel-sized objects embody the inevitable and unbroken cycle of life and death. Among them are vessels fated to dissolve with time: at their conception, the glass was given a “disease,” making the objects vulnerable to moisture. Filled with the artist’s own tears, they are rendered precious through their contents, yet paradoxically fragile due to their transitory nature. In this simultaneous act of preservation and dissolution, Neelova questions the very notion of presence and absence. What happens to our DNA when we are no longer here? The body disappears, yet tears remain sealed in glass. And what happens when they evaporate, eroding the very vessel that preserved them?

Works from Neelova’s seminal Lemniscate series continue this exploration. Using reclaimed wooden banisters from condemned buildings, she reconfigures once-precious yet discarded objects into the form of the infinity symbol. Fascinated by the shape of the old-fashioned banisters, carved precisely to fit one’s palm, Neelova perceives not simple pieces of wood, but thousands of human touches that have passed through the material, each leaving a trace of skin, memory, and shadow. By handling these objects anew and giving them a second life, she not only pays tribute to their history but also takes her own place in it. The temporality of human experience appears fleeting when set against the enduring nature of history.

Several works in UMBRA explore these tensions, but none as directly as Beghost, a pyre of clay rose stems adorned with thorns of fossilised shark teeth, some over 30 million years old. Surrounded historically by rumours and misconceptions, shark teeth were long mistaken for ethereal relics, petrified dragon tongues, or remedies for incurable diseases. Assembled into a V-shaped form that alludes both to fire and to the feminine principle of sexuality, Beghost becomes a representation of female connection to nature and magic. Inspired by the thornless Medieval Rose d’Or of 1330, the sculpture also speaks to the uneasy and dualistic path of women in history, standing in stark opposition to the unthreatening golden paradise imagined by Minucchio Jacobi da Siena.

In 1969, Robert Morris attempted to describe a new development in contemporary sculpture, a way of making rooted in process rather than in the object or an image. He argued that “to begin with the concrete physicality of matter rather than images allows for a change in the entire profile of three-dimensional art: from particular forms to ways of ordering, to methods of production and, finally, to perceptual relevance”. While affirming the significance of the creative act in alignment with postminimalist sculptors such as Morris and Eva Hesse, Neelova does not dematerialise the art object; rather, she anchors it in a connection to place and history that goes beyond the bilateral relationship between artist and creation. In her own words, Neelova’s ambition is to weave “a long line through history, a montage sequence borrowed from different snippets, and a strange loop with no beginning or end—just like the ashes of Pompeii that both destroyed and preserved the city for eternity.” —Bella Kesoyan