Sofya Skidan
Sofya Skidan is a Russian artist exploring post-internet art, spirituality, and post-contemporary urbanism via performance, installation, artist books, and media art. She graduated from the Saint-Petersburg State University of Film and Television and Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. She is also a professional yoga instructor, which is reflected in her choice of materials, techniques, and subject matter. Works with installation, performance, sculpture and video. She explores ways of perceiving the world as information, questions about intuition and transformations and rethinking tools of eastern philosophy in the post-digital world. Her work is a site-specific installation, in which artifacts of post-digital reality are combined with elements of a lost natural landscape, and Eastern spiritual practices with modern Western critical theory, reflecting the problems of our time. Tapping into the complexities of postcontemporary, Skidan raises questions around updated understandings of human and non-human identity within today’s technogenic culture in the anthropocene. The most notable exhibitions include a solo show Transverse Hyperspace at the Fragment gallery (Moscow) as well as features in renowned art fairs, festivals, and group shows – Archstoyaniye, blazar, Future cities (Rosbank), Porto Design Biennale, Garage digital, The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100, and others (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art).
Sofya Skidan’s digital paintings combine research of the inner workings of human memory through natural and technogenic landscapes with textures and surfaces of real-life sculptures and digital imprints. These meta-landscapes include elements of fake and real memories, which offer an altered version of a given landscape. In this series Sofya is interested in creating an uninterrupted space of memory, where mutation becomes the only natural habitat.
