Nika Neelova On “UMBRA” and the Death of Linear Time

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1597980" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/Nika-Neelova.-UMBRA.-Beghost.-2025.-Fossilised-shark-teeth-clay-oil-paint-acrylic-base.-75-x-75-x-70-cm.-Photo-by-Alexei-Kostromin.-Courtesy-of-NIKA-Project-Space.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A conical sculpture made of interwoven golden-brown sticks stands on a clear acrylic base in a minimalist gallery, with another artwork hanging on the wall behind it." width="970" height="647" data-caption='The exhibition’s title, “UMBRA”—Latin for shadow—evokes the very essence of the artist’s world: half-visible, partly erased. <span class="lazyload media-credit">Photo by Alexei Kostromin. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space</span>’>

For art lovers, there is only one way to do it all during the ever-growing list of art weeks: cloning. However, since we are not there yet, the only option seems to be a strict selection of shows to attend among the plethora of exhibitions. In Paris last month, amid the swirl of new voices, major retrospectives and multiple art fairs across arrondissements, I chose one that allowed me to decelerate and truly see: “UMBRA,” Nika Neelova’s solo exhibition, on view through December 19 at NIKA Project Space in Komunuma. (The gallery cluster in Romainville has become a hotspot for art outside Paris, home to some of the city’s most exciting galleries.)

Stepping into the deep blue of the gallery, one enters a dimension where time seems to have stopped behaving. Neelova’s works appear like large, strange animals—or perhaps relics that bridge ancient ritual and urban residue. On one side of the space, vitrines display glass containers reminiscent of Roman funerary urns. On the other, ancient stair bannisters twist into loops replicating the infinity symbol. The exhibition’s title—Latin for “shadow”—evokes the very essence of the artist’s world: half-visible, partly erased. What once was and what might be again converge in the possibility of something yet to come.

For Neelova, whose practice has long explored the material afterlives of objects, “UMBRA” marks a deepening of what she calls “reverse archaeology.” Rather than excavating the past to preserve it, she plays with decay, forcing time to loop back on itself. “Time is folded. It collapses and expands; it’s non-linear,” she tells Observer, slowly caressing one of her handrail sculptures. “Truly, my installations are processes caught mid-transformation. For me, sculpture is just the temporary hardening of a flow.” That is what her work speaks of—if not the hardening of a thought, then certainly the materialization of a flow of reasoning.

A petite, stylish woman wearing a gaminish blue beret, Neelova allows herself to be carried by the stitching of invisible patterns across disciplines and human realms. In her thinking, she moves easily from alchemy to ecology, from etymology to entropy. “I really believe in the consciousness of matter,” she says. “Everything has its own rhythm, its own agency. Wood breathes, glass cracks, metal corrodes. Things move even when we can’t see them.”

This conviction—that matter remembers—underlies the exhibition’s centerpiece: sculptures made from handrails salvaged from demolished staircases. The wood, mostly mahogany imported during the colonial period, has passed through countless hands over the last hundred years. “The handrail is the meeting point between the human body and the architecture of space,” Neelova explains. “It’s molded to the palm, extruded to architectural scale. When it’s touched, it collects microscopic bits of skin, the DNA of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. So every piece becomes a collective portrait.”

She gestures to one loop composed of three spiraling flights of stairs from St. James’s tube station in London, now twisted into a form that recalls both the infinity symbol and the ouroboros, the alchemical serpent devouring its tail. “The ouroboros is about eternal recurrence, the cyclicality of life on earth,” she says. “These works lead you on an endless cycle of repetition. They speak about continuity, the flow of matter through time.”

The handrails remain unpolished, their scars and fractures intact. The artist invites me to touch them and feel the worn grooves where palms from people long gone once rested, the stains of decades of human passage. “It’s impossible not to think of the colonial trajectories of the wood itself, once part of trees that stood for centuries in South American forests before being carved into the domestic narratives of Europe,” says Neelova. “I like the idea of tapping into larger flows that began before me and will continue long after.”

There is something both deeply human and cosmic in the way Neelova describes her work. She often speaks of touch as a form of knowledge and of sculpture as a gesture extended through time. “When you reassemble a staircase, you choreograph the absent body into space. In the absence of people, their ghosts remain as vestigial memory,” she reflects. This sense of haunting runs throughout “UMBRA,” where presence and disappearance intertwine. “Once objects are liberated from function, they acquire new, abstract meanings. Absence and presence are infinitely tied together; it depends which side of the object you look at.”

In one corner, a cluster of small, rough glass bottles gleams. They are Neelova’s lacrimatories—glass flasks modeled after ancient Roman tear catchers, believed to accompany the dead into the afterlife. She reconstructed them using glassmaking recipes uncovered during research at the Warburg Institute in London. “I wanted to make glass the way it was first made,” she says. “Sand mixed with ashes, solidified with lime. Without modern stabilizers, the glass becomes soluble in water. It literally dissolves.” She smiles as she recalls her first attempt, with the help of skeptical glass workers: “We mixed sand and ashes in the furnace, not sure if anything would happen. And then suddenly, glass appeared. It was nothing short of miraculous!”

Each flask, she explains, contains her own tears. Over the course of the exhibition, they gradually whiten and disintegrate, interacting with moisture in the air until they return to dust. “It’s a transformation cycle, from solid to liquid to air. A time-measuring device, like in ancient Rome. When the tears evaporated, mourning was over. I like that it’s about disappearance; the work enforces its own undoing.”

This idea of air as material—the invisible act of breathing made permanent—echoes through many of her pieces, including a set of black-glass eyes inspired by 18th-century medical models. The pieces resemble obsidian, absorbing and reflecting light, appearing at once ancient and futuristic, like a cross between a Vietnamese lacquer vase and a Star Wars prop.

The notion of vision and perception developed further during her residency at Sir John Soane’s Museum, where Neelova became fascinated by how mirrors and reflections altered space. “Soane built a house that’s like an organism, and he filled it with mirrors, ruins, fragments. You never know where you are; it’s almost as if the gaze detaches from the body,” she recalls. “It feels like being inside someone’s consciousness.”

This idea of partial sight—of perceiving through shadow—informs “UMBRA.” “There’s an old English word, mayan, meaning eyes partially closed,” she explains. “It’s where ‘mystery’ comes from. Seeing the world with half-closed eyes allows you to perceive its strangeness. Sometimes, when you see less, you understand more.”

Though research and speculation underpin Neelova’s practice, her approach is intensely physical. “I don’t use any digital programs,” she says with a laugh. “Everyone’s making art through A.I. now, but I wouldn’t even know how to map a shape on a computer! I prefer working by hand, collecting the mistakes. When I collaborate with glassblowers, I tell them, ‘Can you just blow it wrong?’ Because it’s in the errors that the work finds its life.” What fascinates her is not correcting those errors but allowing them to coexist. “History is full of misunderstandings. Each interpretation leaves a trace, just like sediment. I like that chain of meaning folding back on itself.”

That insistence on imperfection links Neelova to artists who see entropy not as decay but as creation. She references philosopher Reza Negarestani’s essay Undercover Softness, which describes “the politics of decay as malleable architecture.” “He writes that decay reconstructs itself in the process of its own destruction,” she says. “I love that idea that the undoing is itself a generative act.”

This view has always belonged to Neelova, even before she knew she wanted to be an artist. As a child, she collected stones and shells. “I was fascinated by how much time is held in a small fragment. You can travel through time by touching it.” That early fascination has matured into an artistic language where materials themselves are storytellers. “As an artist, I feel like a conduit, a facilitator. My work always begins with something found. It’s about continuing what already exists,” says Neelova.

Exiting NIKA Project Space into the damp Parisian weather, through the red brick cluster of galleries in Komunuma, I felt momentarily at peace—my wish to clone myself and attend three openings at once briefly satisfied. The artist’s words lingered in my mind: “Everything is constantly undoing itself. There’s no final form, just constant transformations.” I pondered this for a few minutes before descending the stairs at the Romainville–Carnot metro. The train arrived at full speed; the mechanical doors opened with a loud metallic snap. Linear time—the world of matter—had started all over again.

More in Artists

• Devin B. Johnson Paints the Space Between Memory and Motion

• One Fine Show: “Robert Rauschenberg, Fabric Works of the 1970s” at the Menil Collection

• Izumi Kato’s Hybrid Totemic Forms Trace Possible Paths of Ecological Survival

• How Artist Eamon Ore-Giron Is Keeping Ancient Deities Alive

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures