We are inviting you to an Artist Talk by the upcoming Visiting Artist at UMPRUM Nina Davies
Nov 25 at 4:30 p. m.
in TCM UMPRUM, auditorium, 3rd floor
Mikulandská 5
Prague 1
English friendly, free entrance.
The event is part of the UMPRUM Visiting Artist Studio programme.
In this talk Nina will introduce her work concerning how bodies become commodities in virtual gaming markets such as Emotes on Fortnite. She will then introduce a body of work that emerged from this practice which has included video installation and performance work spanning the past 4 years.
Drawing on her ongoing investigation into dance as a site of cultural exchange, ownership, and exploitation, Nina will trace how specific movement vocabularies are extracted, repackaged, and sold as purchasable animations within billion-dollar gaming ecosystems. She will discuss how this process of commodification strips movement of its social and communal meaning, transforming embodied expression into a tradeable digital asset.
Nina will then walk through a series of works that have grown out of this research, including video installations and live performances that sit at the intersection of popular culture, labour, and the body. These works examine what it means to perform — and to be performed — in an era where movement can be owned, licensed, and looped indefinitely. The talk will touch on her collaborative and solo projects, her engagement with TikTok and algorithmic media as both subject matter and creative material, and the broader questions her practice raises about visibility, credit, and the politics of who gets to profit from the dancing body.
Bio:
Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing how dance in popular culture is disseminated, circulated, made and consumed. Beginning with academic research and legal analysis, her work has evolved to incorporate fiction as a critical method by reimagining emerging dances of today as traditional practices of the future, and placing movement within larger socio-technical contexts. Through this, her practice builds frameworks for engaging with dance as something that acts on and within the world. Her work has been recently exhibited at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Aksioma, Ljubljana; FACT, Liverpool; Western Front, Vancouver; Artspace, Sydney; and Future Gallery; Berlin. She has performed her work at venues such as Tate Britain, Somerset House and The Photographers Gallery in London. In 2021, she co-founded Future Artefacts FM, an artist-run program that showcases artists working with speculative fiction for broadcast which she co-hosts with artist Niamh Schmidtke and curator Rebecca Edwards.
Nina Davies
