About
Nikima Jagudajev (1990) is a US American, Austrian/Uzbek choreographer. Their process based collaborative practice looks at social forms; social relations as spatial relations and how we assemble in fulfilling and considerate ways. Harnessing the choreography of play as a framework, performers (Conduit) and visitors (Arrivor) are incorporated into an open-ended game. World building is aided by a group of artists who shape the playground with elements such as live music, food, a deck of collectable cards, secrets and nonlinear dance choreographies that fold in on themselves like portals through time. These elements work as informal invitations to engage in different ways, shifting attention and offering agency and ontological transformation. Like 3-dimensional Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) this mythopoeic world is both serious and playful, enchanted with meaning and full of mods. One’s experience is determined by the games’ formal properties as well as the interaction of various interpreting subjectivities. Performers and visitors share this slippery universe.
Jagudajev’s work has taken form in venues including Shedhalle (Zürich), Kurimanzutto (Mexico City), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, The Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1 and the Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai) as well as in the context of Material Art Fair’s Immaterial (Mexico City), 89+ at LUMA/Westbau (Zürich), kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) and as part of the Marrakech Biennale (Morocco). They have an upcoming show at WIELS (Brussels) in April 2023.
Published work by Jagudajev includes « The Backstreet Boys » as part of Bergen Kunsthall’s Speculative Histories text commission platform (2021) and co-published by Karmaklubb*, « Relations of Unpredictable Encounters » in the Movement Research Performance Journal (2017) and ‘the landscape thinks itself in me’ in Asad Raza’s Root Sequence. Mother Tongue (Walther König, 2018).