Proposing alternative narratives around the inter-connectedness of micro- and macro systems in nature and human-built societies.
Sofia Albina Novikoff Unger is a Danish Russian multi-disciplinary artist based in London, currently undertaking her MFA at Goldsmiths University with a weekly radio show “Mood~Swings” on Wired Radio. Working with video as a different representation of language, each frame is montaged with sound, CGI, and original and/or found footage, making the comforting and the cute strange. She is also part of the artistic duo Proxy Mund concerned with disembodiment and geo physicality of the digital through techno-feminist discourse.
Recent exhibitions and screenings: ‘6th Moscow Biennale for Young Art’; ‘Item for a Resurrection’, Changing Rooms, London. ‘Selected VII screening’ at Whitechapel Gallery; CCA Glasgow; Nottingham Contemporary; Fabrica; Plymouth Arts Centre; Exeter Phoenix, UK; ‘Irridescent Oil (eons below)’ at Jupiter Woods, London; ‘Selected VII Southeast Asia Tour’ at The Reading Room (Bangkok); Hanoi DocLab & Six Space; Lost Frames (Quezon City); ‘A YES SCREAMING NO’ at The One Minutes, Sandberg Instituut.
Bufo Bufo (aeons below)
HD Video / 06:20 min / 2018
Set in a no-space land, the toad, a mythological creature of endless age, is a post-gender proxy inhabiting the present in a digital sphere which resembles itself endlessly. The narrative opens up a culmination of parallel events and issues like the techno-humans wish to extend life and ‘the animal’ in nature. By queering symbols through digitalisation and CGI to touch upon notions of the space of the in-between, power structures and ecological cycles, the fictive world created with phantasm pushes into the absurd to better understand the limits of “the free world”. As CGI resembles itself, is it necessary to repeat the cultural signifiers of the physical world in it or can new ideas be created and activated in this ‘other world’ by being seduced by both the sinister and comical aspect of it?
Ship, Sea, Woman, what else
HD Video / 05:13 min / 2017
A set of abstract naval narratives about ships at large that are refracted through the disappeared ocean liner Lyubov Orlova, a modern day ghost ship. What’s beyond the myth of its disappearance and the woman it’s named after, the Marilyn Monroe of the East. “Satellites, radars, the tracking, incoming vessels, c-sigma, OFF. Scavenger hunters; All rooting to find you”.
Earth is Burning
HD Video / 01:00 min / 2016
“Here is the trickster bunny Zaitjik 1.0, laughing, non-acting, as the world burns up, waiting for a doomed, ecological collapse. But surely this is not the end, but the start of something new.”