Sofia Nifora

“Artificial memories or idealized dreams? when we let go, daydream, hope and remember.... I wonder, what happens there and then?”

My work revolves around fantasy, dreams and out of joint reality. The place where we find ourselves when nostalgizing and dreaming. We, as individuals or collectives tend to idealize the past. I therefore research the procedure of reminiscing through my personal experience with grief, loss and migration, by recreating symbols of things that once were, yet no longer are. I am documenting and exposing the manipulation reality can unconsciously be subjected to.

I predominately draw upon landscapes from my rural upbringing in Greece, a place of childish idealization. My paintings, drawings and sculptures work as metaphors/allegories to memory and function as autonomous beings, surpassing their identity as clones of the original objects. I focus on transient, wild things in my surroundings because I find a sense of sublimeness and a direct link to time. I create a visual language where the organic and the technological, the real and abstract coexist. I aspire to the possibility of a conversation between the object that once was and no longer is and the use of artificiality and reality juxtaposed in order to recreate vessels of animate sources, ghostly figures of fragmented memories.