Photo by Enting Zang
STATEMENT
I live and work in Düsseldorf. Dance is central to my practice, and improvisation is both my method and my language. Each morning, I dance in public space to house music, surrounded by traffic, church bells, and passing bodies. This daily ritual is research, rehearsal, and invitation. I pay attention to how people respond, how movement reshapes space, and how courage builds through repetition.
My childhood was marked by migration and constant movement, from the Volga to German rivers. That experience shaped my understanding of resilience, routine, and the need to show up fully. I began improvising within hip-hop communities, where the body became a site of knowledge, resistance, and connection. Since then, I have been collecting gestures of resilience from diasporic communities through film installations, participatory performances, and public happenings.
I invite people to dance with me in public, to experiment, to step briefly into vulnerability and shared presence. These encounters are not symbolic. They are lived. The movements and exchanges I gather are later translated into physical forms such as glass books, translucent porcelain, and light boxes, where gesture becomes tangible and memory takes shape.
My work is driven by anger at global inequality, but also by hope. I see the body as both weapon and shield, archive and future. I resist passive spectatorship by drawing my audience into action, asking them to move, respond, and take part. Each invitation is a small act of defiance and care, a way of concentrating social energy and imagining what collective presence might make possible.
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
I live and work in Düsseldorf. Dance is central to my practice, and improvisation is both my method and my language. Each morning, I dance in public space to house music, surrounded by traffic, church bells, and passing bodies. This daily ritual is research, rehearsal, and invitation. I pay attention to how people respond, how movement reshapes space, and how courage builds through repetition.
My childhood was marked by migration and constant movement, from the Volga to German rivers. That experience shaped my understanding of resilience, routine, and the need to show up fully. I began improvising within hip-hop communities, where the body became a site of knowledge, resistance, and connection. Since then, I have been collecting gestures of resilience from diasporic communities through film installations, participatory performances, and public happenings.
I invite people to dance with me in public, to experiment, to step briefly into vulnerability and shared presence. These encounters are not symbolic. They are lived. The movements and exchanges I gather are later translated into physical forms such as glass books, translucent porcelain, and light boxes, where gesture becomes tangible and memory takes shape.
My work is driven by anger at global inequality, but also by hope. I see the body as both weapon and shield, archive and future. I resist passive spectatorship by drawing my audience into action, asking them to move, respond, and take part. Each invitation is a small act of defiance and care, a way of concentrating social energy and imagining what collective presence might make possible.
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.