Nikola Ivanov’s visual meditation titled The World Turns and Water Falls explores the feeling of loss and the inability to forget and come to terms with the past.
At the House of Art in Ústí nad Labem, Nikola Ivanov further develops a video work that was presented last year under the title Everything Is Absolutely Fine at the exhibition The Invisible City at the AMU Gallery in Prague. The artist has further transformed the original footage of this film into a monumental seven-channel installation that dominates the entire space of Gallery 1. Over an area nearly fifty meters long, the gallery walls transform into a dynamic structure that captivatingly disrupts the viewer’s sense of spatial orientation and draws them into a narrative of a journey where memories intertwine with the present, memory plunges into the future and the receding horizon opens up the prospect of the end as the only possible beginning.
The exhibition The World Turns and Water Falls at the House of Art in Ústí nad Labem is a poetic visual poem composed of emotions, fears, losses, beginnings, and a journey that Nikola Ivanov concludes in his latest paintings with a foreshadowing of a flood and irreversible destruction:
“I’ll reach the river, even though I don’t remember a river ever flowing through this city.
Am I even in the right city?
Will you let yourself be carried away by the current?
Will you close your eyes before it’s all gone?”
Nikola Ivanov (born 1990) is an intermedia artist who works primarily with photography, video, and text. He is interested in themes of time, memory, night, sleep, and biopolitics. He studied at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He edited the anthology Rest in Restlessness (2022), dedicated to the biopolitics of sleep, and is the author of the book Blinded by Brightness (2025), which explores the colonization of the night and the history of plans to illuminate nighttime areas using mirrors placed in orbit. He is co-head of the Applied Photography studio at the Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem.
Curator
Michal Koleček