školská 28

Nika Kupyrova is visual artist, a graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, currently working in Vienna and Prague. In her work she focuses mainly on mixed-media installation and photography that use re-assembled found materials to explore the qualities of the space as a habitat and as a concept of "home".

Essential to her concept of readymade is the ability of such objects to create an emotionally coloured space, which is then narrated by the artist through deliberate suggestions and visual clues. Her installations glamourise domesticalities, offering an insight into a fictional habitat; explore the routines; the eccentricities; and homemade erotica. The substance of those artificial living spaces is the inherent contradiction between their theatrical qualities and an abandoned habitat, deliberate exposure and trespass into the intimate landscape.

Her interest in habitats partly relates to the upbringing in the post-USSR nomadic lifestyle of her family. She is attracted to the adaptable qualities of the objects in living spaces and skills of temporary home-making. Overtime, the unfamiliar space becomes a personal comfort zone. Her work sythezises those living spaces, mapping the history of the individual through the traces left on their inanimate surroundings. The resulting multi-layered, tactile pieces use the past functions and sentiments of the original materials to invite the viewers to become poetic Frankensteins of the fictional past.