NIKIDANAI
Niki Danai Chania is a multi-disciplinary artist and creative director based in Amsterdam and Athens. She studied in the National Technical University of Athens, AKTO Art and Design College and Design Academy Eindhoven. Since 2019 she is the co-founder of the art-design practice Un.Processed.Realities which takes place in Athens and Eindhoven. Since 2021, she is the co-founder of ESTO Association, a collaborative, non-profit studio in Athens bringing together art, design and politics.
Her work draws from the co-existence of reality, fiction and myths expressing historically universal socio-political narratives. She aims to confront societal power imbalances, using text and visual narratives as an act of questioning or repair, offering new perspectives on established stories and social structures. Grounded in personal experiences, her work builds bridges between real and fantasised pasts mixing the ancient and the modern and the old with the new mythologies. Symbolism, expressing universal meanings is used to connect these epochs and also address the human condition that remains the same: Struggles, social injustice, darkness, beauty, despair, oppression and love,recur throughout the centuries. Her primary medium is sculpture, originating from textual narrations, with occasional integration of other media such as sound pieces, video, and drawings, selected to complement the theme. The materiality of her work highlights the emotions evoked by these stories, where both darkness and beauty, desperation and adoration, coexist.
She has showed her work in spaces like Basia Embiricos Gallery (Paris, 2022), Centrum (Berlin, 2021), Backhaus (Vorspiel, Transmediale Berlin, 2024), KEIV Gallery (Athens, 2021), Romantso, (Athens, 2020), PS Gallery (Athens, 2021), Cultural Foundation of Tinos (Tinos, 2023) attended residencies like Hotel Pupik (Austria, 2022) and EKWC-European Ceramic Workcentre (Netherlands 2024) and curated exhibitions and projects like KRAMA –a festival that combines art with contemporary electronic and classical music.
