Sofya Skidan (b. 1996, Ukhta) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Moscow. In her practice, she explores ways of perceiving the world as information, questions about intuition and transformations, reflections on speculative history, and the spectator’s visionary experience. Skidan works with installation, performance, sculpture and video; she also is a professional yoga instructor, which is reflected in her choice of materials, techniques, and subject matter. In her works, artifacts of post-digital reality meet elements of a lost natural landscape, and Eastern spiritual practices are combined modern Western critical theory.
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How Can You Describe… The cybershaman’s body adapts to its environment — one that is both natural and constructed. An emerging, hybrid identity arises from Skidan’s attempt to capture the elusive sensation of postcontemporaneity
How Can You Describe the Weirdness That Is Not Assembled Enough? Curators: Elena Ischenko, Marianna Kruchinsky. Training Fantasia, Typography, 2021
This Trap Is Named Viscosity, 2021. The sculpture shows the scenario of potential ecological misbalance which may be caused by the appearance of a new virus in an ecosystem. The Darwin Museum, Moscow
This Trap Is Named Viscosity, 2021. The project suggest a possibility of mutation, where all notions of “prey” and “predator”, illustrated by the museum objects around, will disappear
Vulnerability, Lifted, 2020. The viewers are invited into a mystical dimly lit space of the installation, where they can smell, touch, and observe a number of objects
Vulnerability, Lifted, 2020. The project also includes a performance-workshop on psychological and sensory experience. Structured as a performance lecture, it demonstrates several meditative and bodily techniques
Vulnerability, Lifted, 2020. The purpose of the workshop is to help the viewer overcome their fatigue and let go of the usual patterns of movement and thinking
Vulnerability, Lifted, 2020. Curators: Kristina Romanova, Nail Farkhatdinov. All-Russia Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art
What Is Hidden Does Not Need to Be Hidden, 2021. This AR sculpture is meant to redistribute the viewer’s attention in an oversaturated urban environment
What Is Hidden… reimagines the idea of dérivé, or drift — the psychogeographic practice of studying the urban landscapes through unusual tactics of moving through them — and combines it with the Eastern traditions of meditation
What Is Hidden Does Not Need to Be Hidden, 2021. The AR sculpture is accompanied by an audio guide recorded by the artist
