“What if…?” Artist Dasha Loyko-Greer on the non-linear perception of time, philosophy of art, and “memory of the future”

Vera Otdelnova: Please tell us about your journey into art: how and why did you decide to become an artist, and why did you choose the Royal College of Art? What do you think was the most important part of your education?

Dasha Loyko-Greer: London was a major factor. I remember, about 10 years ago, going to exhibitions, especially degree shows at art schools, and thinking, “This is also possible?” I’ve been making art for as long as I can remember, but it was here that I started to consider it as a career. The energy of this city continues to influence my work. As a child, I dreamt of becoming an inventor. Now I realise that’s exactly what happened. My grandfather was an artist, and my great-grandfather was also an artist. I grew up surrounded by their paintings, so my interest in art felt completely natural at home.

I went to the Royal College of Art (RCA) for my Master’s right after completing my Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at the London School of Economics (LSE). I was enchanted by the energy of creative possibility and the sense of freedom I felt at the RCA. I remember attending their Open Day. At the time, I was writing my Philosophy dissertation, so I spent the first half of the day at the LSE library, which has its own entrepreneurial charm and serious demeanour — half the students are dressed in business casual, and most are preparing for careers in finance or management. From there, I went to the RCA Battersea campus for the first time to see the university, and the first thing I encountered was a performance class, where all the students got completely naked and started tying themselves up in various configurations. Now, I see that the most important thing in my education was the synthesis of these two very different worlds that I was fortunate to delve into.

VO: Please tell us about your working method. You’ve mentioned and written that meditation is very important to you, and that your works are created from observing your inner state. I’m curious how these observations take shape. Do you have a system where each colour, shape, or figure corresponds to a particular emotional state, or do you rely more on intuition?

DLG: Great question. I like to call my method Speculative Autofiction. It’s a multimedia blend of algorithmic games and intuition. I’m interested in how intuition itself is formed. Even as a philosophy student, I found it fascinating how logical thinking interacts with physical sensations and the subconscious. The search and practice of synthesising theoretical knowledge with somatic experience is the foundation of my method.

Let me give you a few examples of how this takes shape. For my recent solo exhibition Georgios, Gravity & God (2023) at Lake, a project space in London, a key element was a recording of my voice. I worked with a yoga and voice coach. The work and the text that was at its core were about trying to piece together the image of oneself out of the reflections in the eyes of others. While the gesture itself is quite anxious and has the affect of a disorienting hall of mirrors, I wanted my voice to be grounded in my body. I learnt some breathing exercises from the coach and invited her to lead a session with me in the recording studio. The session served both as a warm-up for recording my script and also as a key part of the work. We laid out a yoga mat, set up four microphones around me, and recorded my breath and vocalisations, which later got folded into the sound design made by the music producer Wordcolour for Georgios, Gravity & God.

Recently, I added painting to the range of material forms that my work takes. I’d been heading in that direction for a few years, and a pivotal moment happened during my 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in 2022. In a state of sensory and informational isolation, clocking in over 100 hours of meditation, I experienced an intense altered (I prefer the term “expanded”) state of consciousness. 

Meditation does for the body what philosophy does for the mind — it loosens the grip of our habits of perception, shakes up familiar coordinates, and allows us to rearrange them in a more conscious manner. Painting, for me, is about being fully present and aware of my own experience in that moment and creating an architecture of my own points of reference based on that experience, as well as about a playful interaction with the established canons of art history. There is a vast wealth of information that is available to tap into if we dare to deliberately disrupt and suspend habitual thought patterns even for a second and tune inward. Through painting, I process this disorienting absence of coordinates through radical self-trust.

VO: You work with different media and create complex installations that include both visual and sound elements. In the description of your installation Georgios, Gravity & God, you mention the 7.1 Surround Sound system. Please tell us about this system and your concept of working with sound.

DLG: For the technical aspect of the sound in this installation, I collaborated with Lake, which has an 8-speaker system built into the space, while the soundscape for the work was produced by Wordcolour. Lake specialises in working with artists who use sound in their practice. There are many elements in this audio work — my speech, my voice, the music, and audio from my personal archive. With Lake’s technical help, we created the sensation of sound elements moving around the viewer. Acoustic panels were also installed in the space, which I used as canvases for charcoal drawings made in the space. These panels completely removed the echo. The feedback from the audience was that the environment we created was both disorienting and sharpened their focus on the work, which was exactly my aim.

VO: You have a very unusual (nonlinear) perception of time: in one of your texts, I read that your work is influenced not only by the past but also by the future. How is this possible? What helps you make these time-travel journeys?

DLG: Linear perception of time is a habit. Leaving aside spiritual and esoteric teachings, the knowledge of many indigenous peoples, and even the theory of synchronicity of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, which all suggest at least a more expanded view of time, even mainstream physics has long since proven the nonlinearity of time. Starting with Einstein’s theory of relativity, where time is relative and matter intertwines with energy, and later with quantum physics, where information can travel instantly between “entangled” particles across vast distances.

There’s often a significant gap between our theoretical knowledge and our everyday perception of the world. I’ve always been fascinated by this dissonance, and I constantly work to resolve it by developing new habits of interpreting my sensory experience.

Developing new habits, including habits of perceiving time, is a constant process of experimentation that brings me immense pleasure. For example, what would happen if the mental experience we usually call a “dream” (visualising any desired scenario, like getting into a university, building a house, seeing the northern lights) which later comes true, were instead called “memory of the future”? What if you made a deal with your inner sceptic and allowed yourself at least five minutes to live with such a worldview? What about an hour? Maybe a whole day? I constantly play with these kinds of perceptual shifts. Cause-and-effect relationships are far more complex, tangled, and fascinating than a linear view of time allows.

VO: In the description of your body of work Happiness & Shame, you say that your ultimate goal is to undo the effects of the gaslighting that many people, especially women, experience in relation to their bodies. Can it be said that your art has a social function? How do you define the relationship between the personal and the social in your work?

DLG: Perhaps the main social goal of my work is to inspire people to trust themselves in a more radical capacity. The vast majority of our habits of perception, both in relation to ourselves and the world, are developed unconsciously, absorbing the norms and patterns of perception from our social environment. This is a huge drain of our vital energy. Whether in the post-Soviet space or Western culture, it’s common not to listen to our bodies and rely more on the rational mind, even though our primary experience of reality comes through our senses. Through a conscious synthesis of our own image of reality, integrating the information perceived by the body and the mind, an enormous amount of energy is released, and many blocks dissolve. For me, the key to this release and management of energy is in the audacious curiosity about the vast multitude of ways of making sense of our lived experience. The main question is: “What if…?”

Cover photo: Dasha Loyko-Greer at her studio. Photography Jon Baker