NADA New York 2023

Nikita Gale’s work explores the relationship between materials, power, and attention. A key tenet of the artist’s practice is that attention is an ancient and valuable resource that can be manipulated by various means and materials for various ends. The structures that shape attention determine who or what is seen, heard, recorded, remembered, and believed.

Gale’s practice examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions. Gale’s broad-ranging installations – often comprising concrete, barricades, video and automated sound and lighting – blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. By approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes, the artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labor and violence are displaced and concentrated.