Photo by Enting Zang
STATEMENT
My artistic practice begins every morning on the playground next to my apartment in Düsseldorf. I dance for fifteen minutes in public to House beats, accompanied by traffic, music, and church bells. This small daily routine is at once research, ritual, and invitation. I watch how people respond, how space and movement shape one another.
Since my childhood, marked by migration and many moves from the Volga to German rivers, I have learned that we must first show our pure intention to truly change the world. A world that promotes the fiction of individualism, rebrands segregation for profit and builds institutions on the myth that we don’t need each other to survive. The most political pronoun requires courage and routine – we/us are my pure intention. Since improvising in Hip-Hop communities, I have been collecting the resiliencies of our diasporas in film installations, happenings, and participatory performances. I invite people to dance with me in public, to experiment, and to explore their own movements.
My work emerges from a restless anger at global inequality – but also from hope. “We know, they know, we know they’re lying – and yet they keep lying,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote. This ignites in me the drive to concentrate social energy. The gestures of resilience I collect are made tangible in glass books, translucent porcelain, or light boxes. Every movement, every invitation into personal vulnerability, becomes palpable. The body is for me both weapon and shield, archive and future – and that is why I draw my audience out of their passive role, inviting them into shared experience and action.
EDUCATION
Meisterschüler 2018-2024 Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts
Prof. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
École des Sables Senegal, Experimental Flow
with Alesandra Seutin, 2023
Design & Art Academy
Burg Giebiechenstein Halle, 2013-2018
Industrial Design & Time Based Arts
hi@darianazarenko.co
hi@darianazarenko.co
Photo by Enting Zang
STATEMENT
My artistic practice begins every morning on the playground next to my apartment in Düsseldorf. I dance for fifteen minutes in public to House beats, accompanied by traffic, music, and church bells. This small daily routine is at once research, ritual, and invitation. I watch how people respond, how space and movement shape one another.
Since my childhood, marked by migration and many moves from the Volga to German rivers, I have learned that we must first show our pure intention to truly change the world. A world that promotes the fiction of individualism, rebrands segregation for profit and builds institutions on the myth that we don’t need each other to survive. The most political pronoun requires courage and routine – we/us are my pure intention. Since improvising in Hip-Hop communities, I have been collecting the resiliencies of our diasporas in film installations, happenings, and participatory performances. I invite people to dance with me in public, to experiment, and to explore their own movements.
My work emerges from a restless anger at global inequality – but also from hope. “We know, they know, we know they’re lying – and yet they keep lying,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote. This ignites in me the drive to concentrate social energy. The gestures of resilience I collect are made tangible in glass books, translucent porcelain, or light boxes. Every movement, every invitation into personal vulnerability, becomes palpable. The body is for me both weapon and shield, archive and future – and that is why I draw my audience out of their passive role, inviting them into shared experience and action.
EDUCATION
Meisterschüler 2018-2024 Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts
Prof. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
École des Sables Senegal, Experimental Flow
with Alesandra Seutin, 2023
Design & Art Academy
Burg Giebiechenstein Halle, 2013-2018
Industrial Design & Time Based Arts
BIO
Daria Nazarenko is moving between film stills and subcultures. By staging bodies and cameras, she highlights the hidden dynamics of social life. Her works encompass multimedia video installations, hybrid dance films, and site-specific live performances. Her artistic practice was significantly influenced by her travels to Senegal from 2021 to the present, where she felt the urge to involve a non-western collective approach through programs at "École des Sables" integrating diverse cultural perspectives. Her artistic practice includes curating urban spaces into museum-like environments, with happenings at the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, as well as in Moscow the not-found-Gallery and in Paris at the Beaux-Arts-Ateliers. Currently she is curating permamently at the Gemeinde Köln with the focus on happenings in public spaces. Her works have been showcased in institutions such as PACT Zollverein, K21 Düsseldorf, Sotheby's Cologne and at tanzhaus nrw.
BIO
Daria Nazarenko is moving between film stills and subcultures. By staging bodies and cameras, she highlights the hidden dynamics of social life. Her works encompass multimedia video installations, hybrid dance films, and site-specific live performances. Her artistic practice was significantly influenced by her travels to Senegal from 2021 to the present, where she felt the urge to involve a non-western collective approach through programs at "École des Sables" integrating diverse cultural perspectives. Her artistic practice includes curating urban spaces into museum-like environments, with happenings at the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, as well as in Moscow the not-found-Gallery and in Paris at the Beaux-Arts-Ateliers. Currently she is curating permamently at the Gemeinde Köln with the focus on happenings in public spaces. Her works have been showcased in institutions such as PACT Zollverein, K21 Düsseldorf, Sotheby's Cologne and at tanzhaus nrw.