photography: Nishant Shukla, 2023
Artist | Bio
I am a multimedia artist born in Minsk in 1995 and rooted in London since 2009. I work across writing, installation, voice, still and moving image, sculpture, intuitive mark-making, and more.
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My work plays with received interpretations of reality and the fictioning of the self.
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It serves as a reliable companion and conduit for expanded states of consciousness, an invitation into a space of deeper self-connection and trust in our own experience of reality.
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I seek to bring the subconscious narratives we use to frame our experience of the world to the surface, making them visible, malleable, and unfixed.
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In particular, I am interested in the self- and reality-defining scripts that we internalise in response to fear, guilt, shame, and trust in authority.
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In my practice, I have developed processes that are geared towards a kind of flattening of information streams and seeing them from a bird’s eye view.
By stepping beside the gatekeeping ego,
deeply and actively looking at these scripts and their place in my information ecology, I hack them, pull them out, play with them, rescript and reroute their meaning channels.
In making my work, I use the tools I have developed through my formal training as an artist and my early training as a philosopher as well as through personal investigations into consciousness and my ongoing work as a mentor.
I make my work from a space where there is no illusion of separateness between the physical and the mental phenomena, from where it is self-evident how language moulds reality into shape and vice versa, where new paths are scripted into the fabric of the pulsing collective consciousness from which the physical world takes its shape.
My early influence was shaped by my deep study of philosophy. From the age of 17, I was enchanted by the possibility of trying on different thinking paradigms and switching them up every few weeks; how learning about different ideas about the nature of reality can deeply impact my subjective experience of it. I ended up studying Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method as an undergraduate, continuing my practice-based investigation of seeing the world through the plethora of available mind games.
By my early twenties, I started to feel the limits of the kind of rational left-brain-heavy philosophy I was so invested in. What once felt liberating, offering so many different viewpoints to peek at the world from, started to feel like it all derived from still overarchingly the same way of thinking. Cracks and leaks started to appear in what had been presented to me as a watertight system of thought. The rational paradigm was crashing and glitching against my everyday lived experience.
It gradually dawned on me that all of the kaleidoscopic variations of ideas about the reality that I had spent five rather formative years researching were in fact rather limited by their insistence on the superiority of the rational computational mind above all other sources and systems of knowledge. I started to look outside the rational framework, into its limits and slippages, into the subconscious and into the body as a site of knowing. Inward and outward. This landed me at the Royal College of Art on the Contemporary Art Practice MA degree, where I cut my teeth on the making, the writing, the scripting, the sculpting, and making sense of all of these processes that now define my work.
My practice is now firmly rooted in my approach that integrates intellectual mind games, spirituality, altered states of consciousness, including meditation and hypnosis, and bodywork.
DL, 2024
