ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

NATALIA NIKULENKOVA

March - October 2023

We, 24.05.23, 19:00 @ Niki, Weißenburgstraße 2a, Hannover
ARTIST TALK

Niki is very pleased to invite you to a lecture by Natalia Nikulenkova. She would like to talk about how she has found more and more intense forms of artistic approach to activism in her artistic work. Through different stages and projects of her work it will become visible how her work has changed from building temporary wind-borne architectures to collectively organized protest as an art form and collaborating with marginalized people and groups of people against the backdrop of a constantly tightening Russian judicial system and at the same time her conviction that today it is a great necessity to resist the current Russian totalitarianism through activist forces and supporting and solidarizing with the people in Ukraine.

After the artist talk, the program will feature a special guest: Russian activist and ex-political prisoner Ivan Astashin. Ivan is a member of the human rights initiative Solidarity Zone. In his lecture, Ivan will talk about how the Russian state persecutes those who resist militarism from within the country.

ABOUT

Natalia Nikulenkova is currently a resident artist at Niki. Before coming to Hannover she lived and worked in Moscow. In her artistic work she investigates political power structures and their relationship to the everyday and the individual. She focuses on helping marginalized people and groups of people gain a voice through her often participatory projects and events. Natalia's multi-media and often performative approach combines activist approaches with artistic strategies and addresses various socio-political issues such as the social stigmatization of mental illness, the affectivity and transformation of labor, both collective and individual memory of the former Soviet Union, and the psychosocial consequences of military conflict. Natalia's art is rooted in everyday life and in the stories and experiences of those with whom she collaborates. Patients in psycho-neurological clinics, imprisoned underage girls, nurses, mothers, war veterans and refugees from post-Soviet countries.

Natalia Nikulenkova is an Artists at Risk (AR)-Resident at Niki.