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Please tell us about your path in art: how and why did you decide to become an artist? Why did you choose the Royal College of Art? What was the most important thing in your education?
London was a big factor. I remember about 10 years ago going to exhibitions, especially of thesis work in art schools, and thinking, “Can I do that too?” I’ve been doing art for as long as I can remember, but it was here that I started to consider it as a career. The energy of London really inspired me and continues to do so. In general, I’ve dreamed of being an inventor since I was a child. Now I realize that this is exactly what I have been able to do. In my family, my grandfather was an artist and my great-grandfather was also an artist, I grew up with their paintings on the walls, and at home my interest in art felt completely natural.
I joined the Royal College of Art (RCA) for my Master’s program right after my BA in Philosophy at the London School of Economics (LSE). I was absolutely mesmerized by the atmosphere and freedom of the university. I remember coming to Open Day at the RCA – I was writing my BA in Philosophy at the time – and spending the first half of the day in the LSE library, where there is an entrepreneurial charm and seriousness, half the students are dressed in business casual and most are preparing for a career in finance or management. From there I went to the RCA campus in Battersea to see the university from the inside for the first time, and ended up in a performance class where all the students suddenly stripped naked and started tying themselves to columns. The most important thing I see in my education now is the synthesis of such different two worlds that I was lucky enough to delve into.
Please tell us about your working method. You say and write that meditation is very important to you and that your work is born out of the observation of the inner state. I’m curious, how do these observations take shape? Do you have a system where each color, shape or form corresponds to a particular state of mind? Or do you rely more on intuition?
That’s a great question. I like to call my method – speculative autofiction. It’s a kind of multimedia mix of algorithmic games and intuition. I’m interested in how intuition itself is formed. Ever since my philosophical education, I have been very interested in how logical thinking interacts with the physical worldview and the subconscious mind. Finding and practicing the synthesis between theory and corporeality, language and sensation, is the basis of my method.
Here are some examples of how this is taking shape. For my recent solo exhibition Georgios, Gravity & God at the lake project space in London (2023), a key element of which was the recording of my speech, I worked with a yoga and voice coach. The work itself, and the text that formed the basis of it, is about finding yourself through the reflection in the eyes of others. I wanted my voice to be grounded in my body. I had been practicing breathing practices with a coach and invited her to do a session with me right in the recording studio, as a warm-up for recording my speech and also as a key part of the process. We laid out a yoga mat, put four microphones around it and recorded the breathing and vocalizations that later became a big part of Georgios, Gravity & God’s sound design.
Not too long ago I added painting to my repertoire. I’ve been going at it for several years and the key moment was my 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in 2022, where I experienced a powerful state of altered (I prefer the term “expanded”) consciousness in a state of information isolation and 100+ hours of meditation. Meditation does for the physical state what philosophy does for the mind – relaxes the grip of habitual perception of the world, erases habitual coordinates and allows you to set them up again, more consciously. Painting for me is about the momentary, about the presence and creation of one’s own reference points and also about a playful interaction with the established canons of art history. Through painting I work through this disorienting lack of coordinates through an absolutely radical trust in myself.
You work with different media and create complex installations that utilize visual and sound imagery. The description of the installation Georgios, Gravity & God talks about a 7.1 surround sound system. Please tell us about your concept of working with sound.
I worked on the technical part of the sound for this installation in collaboration with lake space, which has such a system of 8 speakers. They specialize in working with artists who use sound in their practice. There are many different elements in this work – my speech, my voice, music written specifically for it in collaboration with my friend, the composer Wordcolour, as well as audio from my personal archive. With the technical help of lake we created a sense of movement of different audio elements around the viewer. There were also acoustic panels installed in the space, which I used as canvases for the charcoal work made in the space itself. They completely removed the echo. The audience said that we created a completely mesmerizing and disorienting effect of total immersion – absolutely what I was aiming for.
You have a very unusual (non-linear) perception of time: in one of your texts I read that your works are influenced not only by the past, but also by the future. How is this possible? What helps you to travel through time?
Linear perception of time is a habit. Leaving aside spiritual and esoteric teachings, the knowledge of many indigenous peoples, even the very synchronicity of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, which suggest a larger picture of time, even mainstream physics has long since proven the non-linearity of time, beginning with Einstein’s theory of relativity, where time is relative and matter is intertwined with energy, and later quantum physics, where information can travel between “entangled” particles instantaneously across vast distances.
The point is that there is often a significant gap between our theoretical knowledge and our everyday perception of the world. I have always been interested in this dissonance, and I am constantly working to resolve it by developing new habits of thinking about my experience.
Developing new habits, including habits of time perception, is a constant work and experimentation that I enjoy immensely. For example, what would happen if a thought experience that we usually call a “dream” (visualizing any desired scenario such as going to university, building a house, seeing the northern lights), later realized, we call a “memory” of the future? What if we agree with our inner skeptic and give ourselves at least five minutes to live in such a picture of the world? What if an hour? Or maybe a whole day? I have this kind of fun all the time. Cause and effect relationships are far more expansive, intricate, and fascinating than a linear view of time allows them to be.
In the description for the Happiness & Shame series, you say that your ultimate goal is to end the gaslighting that many people and especially women receive about their bodies. Would you say that your art has a social agenda? How do you define the balance between the personal and the social?
Perhaps the main social purpose of my work is to inspire people to trust themselves more radically. The vast majority of the habits we develop unconsciously, absorbing the way the world is perceived in our society, is a huge drain on our energy and vitality. Both in the post-Soviet space and in Western culture it is customary not to hear one’s body and to rely more on the mind, despite the fact that our primary experience of reality is through the senses. Through the conscious synthesis of one’s own picture of reality, the integration of corporeality and mind, a tremendous amount of energy is released and many blocks are dissolved. For me, the key to this release and management of my energy is an absolutely daring and sincere curiosity about life and lived experience. The main question is, “What if…?”
Cover photo: Dasha Loyko-Greer at her studio. Photography Jon Baker