projects.
about.
Kika Nicolela is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker and independent curator, living between Brussels and São Paulo. Graduated in Film and Video by the University of Sao Paulo, Nicolela has also completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. The artist was nominated for the international award EXTRACT – Young Art Prize in 2014, and she was the recipient of several prominent Brazilian grants and awards. She has participated of over 100 solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including the Kunst Film Biennale (Germany), Bienal of the Moving Image (Argentina), Bienal do Mercosul (Brazil), Ventosul Bienal de Curitiba (Brazil) and Bienal de Video y Artes Mediales (Chile). Her videos have been screened and awarded in festivals of more than 30 countries. She was in residence at the Gyeonggi Creation Center (South Korea), Objectifs (Singapore), Route Fabrik (Switzerland) and LIFT (Canada), among others. Her works are placed in private and public collections in Brazil and Europe. Her videos are distributed by Vtape, Heure Exquise and GIV.
Kika Nicolela is interested in the encounter with the other, mediated by the camera – mostly, the video camera. The camera is a tool for her, not of recording, documenting or enacting, but of triggering a situation, relationships and behaviors. Often she ends up doing a type of human archive, a collection of people reacting to a certain proposition. The camera is essential to help her investigate representation and self-representation, identity and alterity, portrait and self-portrait, and create a space of fluctuation between these binaries. She's been interested in making videos and video-installations that allow the spectator to have a larger role in the production of meaning, that is, works in which the meaning is reached through the constant negotiation between the spectator and the elements – often multiple and ambiguous – of the narrative. This ambivalence in the moving image is what she is searching for: works that produce a heightened experience of the very ambiguity of our own subjectivity and of the real.
video interview by Emilia Tavares, curator of National Museum of Contemporary Art
video interview by Marcia Beatriz Granero for the Museum of Image and Sound
interview by Gabriel Soucheyre, director of Videoformes Festival
