The world around us lingers on the brittle line between plastic reality and authentic pretension— Disneyland and Hollywood, Pleasantville and the street you were born on, a fatal crash and a ride in a bumper car. My work begins with private performances staged in borrowed spaces, or rather, unauthorized sets, from short stay hotel rooms and public garages to inhabited apartments. These locations are often liminal spaces of transitory nature, historically pushed to the edges of cities, or fully operational when most are asleep. Rather than the climactic moment itself, my work teases with a glimpse into a scene that has just passed or is about to unfold, remixing elements of observed reality with fiction. Hinting at the observer, the gaze directed by the monochromatic beam of the hunting light, my focus is on POV, pulling as much from cinema, as the world below the knees. Painting, sound and light can be understood as artefacts from performances that come together in the form of installation. Abruptly cropping and reassembling moments from these rehearsed dances - sometimes stumbles at best - between narratives, I am working through codependency of desire and shame inherent to inhabiting these spaces, but even more so, the act of peeking into them.
Nana Wolke was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1994 and lives and works in London. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London and received BFA with honors from the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana. She completed her last year of parallel study at Academy for Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana through a study exchange at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig (class of Prof. Michael Riedel). Her work has been featured internationally, including 31. Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, SI (2016); G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, DE (2018); Kiribati National Museum and Cultural Centre, Tarawa, KI (2019); Bangkok Biennial, London, UK (2021); Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, IT (2021); Green Family Art Foundation (2022), Dallas, TX; and Marlborough, London, UK (2022) among others. In 2021, she has been selected as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries with exhibitions in Firstsite Museum and South London Gallery, both in UK. In 2022 she will have a solo exhibition at Nicoletti Contemporary in London.