Artist Highlight: Nana Wolke

Before our event this Saturday May 16, A Virtual Symposium: Presented by Salon 21 & Made in Bed ft. Nana Wolke, MADE IN BED got together (virtually) with artist Nana Wolke. For this weeks Thursday Artist Highlight (primarily an Instagram series), we have correlated some artworks, statements and explanations from Nana.

Artist Bio: Nana Wolke (b. 1994, Ljubljana) received her BFA with honors at the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana and completed her last year of 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 AMU Gallery, Prague, CZ (2016); 31. Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, SI (2016); 12 Star Gallery, London, GB (2016); G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, DE (2018); The Living Gallery Outpost, New York, NY (2018); and Kiribati National Museum and Cultural Centre, Tarawa, KI (2019) among others. In 2019 she had her first solo exhibition in Stekleni Atrij Gallery in Ljubljana, SI. She has been nominated for OHO Young Visual Arts Award (2018), Ljubljana, SI; and is a recipient of the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia’s Scholarship for promising young artists (2019). She is currently studying at Goldsmiths MFA in London.

Lorna: Can you tell us about a childhood memory?

Nana: When I was around 5 and I wasn’t really reading fluently yet, but I had a habit of “reading” children’s books out loud. My parents found it quite funny and still have pictures of it, in one of them I am sitting on the toilet seat under an umbrella with a book in the other hand, full on storyteller mode. In the first year of elementary school I convinced a friend that I could read more sophisticated texts - one of those thicker teen novels - and I narrated a good portion of the book to her right then and there in the middle of the school library. Days later she put my glorious performance to the test asking her mom to read the book to her again - let's just say it had nothing to do with the story I told. I guess I’ve always been a bit of an inventor of fictions, a trickster of sorts.

Lorna: Are you excited to enter the virtual world with us on Saturday? Do you have fears, prospects?

Nana: I am extremely excited to see how freaky sharing my wildest ideas alone in the room for an hour might feel, haha. That said, I think the format is more than perfect for quite literally transferring my Sims Sets directly onto other people’s screens. That might be the work at its best, bringing us back to when we all skipped sleep to see our male character deliver an alien baby after being kidnapped for days by a UFO, or something typically crazy for Sims like that. I will be talking about ideas, concerns and fascinations I am truly passionate about, therefore I hope this will speak to people who are not familiar with my work yet (as well as those who never fail to show up, I truly appreciate it!!) and fuel a discussion that can follow this talk. At the end of the day it’s all about generating conversation about topics we deem important, topics that get lost in the vertigo of everything changing with a fast pace these days.

“Based on the images taken around our family house during lockdown, this series I started a few weeks ago considers windows as rabbit holes to fictional microcosms. Framing us from the outside to the gaze of our neighbours and passersby, windows serve as the last raw and unplanned escape from our virtual, and now personal, deliriums.”

— Nana Wolke

Artist Statement: They say, when summer comes, superstar villains move from underneath our beds to vacation in Dolly Parton’s Tennessee Mountain home replica. Like an uncomfortable existence of a spring child of Marilyn Manson and Mickey Mouse, a real man who turned fiction, and a fictional character crowned ultimate good’s posterchild, my work 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. As I take myself on the binge between these worlds melting into one another, I am interested in objects we live with as signs, carriers of norms and values, and building blocks of new fantasy microcosms, where the hangover of that summer night can not be washed away with orange juice.

Lorna: Why are you an artist?

Nana: I was fortunate enough to have embodied a pretty awkward existence as a child, which made me discover art very early on. It was the only way for me to be in the world, which hasn’t changed even though nowadays anyone that knows me can’t believe that I will ever shut up. But seriously, being an artist on the outside looks like a one-man-band and it often isn’t, at least my practice truly benefits from collaborations and inputs from other people. That is the best part of being an MFA student, when you can exchange ideas and get incredible inspiration for the day just simply passing through studios on the way to make a cup of coffee - or Diet Coke in my case. The creative process enables me to explore things that seem beyond words and access more immediate responses to our reality. At the moment I am really interested in the unique position of windows to the outside world we left behind as the pleasure of staying in and the anxieties of reality mediated by our screens are taking over our lives.

I want to take this opportunity to emphasise how we all know this art life is a total dream but can easily get really tough with the insecure structures the art world provides, especially for us emerging artists trying to make sense of it on our own terms. This global pandemic was a textbook example of how fragile this system is in times of crisis with thousands of people living an extremely insecure existence as we speak. I am really happy to see organisations like the NADA (The New Art Dealers Alliance) creating an initiative that offers support to these communities and I hope donations that we will gather through this event will help facilitate it. Please donate any amount you feel comfortable with, each contribution, no matter how small, really counts.

If you would like to attend the event this Saturday May 16 please sign up online here to receive your ticket. If you are unable to attend but would like to donate please register and there is an option to donate.

Thank you. Imagery curtesy of the artist.

Lorna Tiller

Editor-in-Chief, MADE IN BED

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