Nicole Khadivi »Anatomy of an After, pt 1«

Nicole Khadivi is a Stockholm-based artist working with installations where light, glass, and movement create spatial animations. Grounded in lens-based art, her practice returns to the materiality of the image — glass and light — at a time when image-making is increasingly detached from physical reality. She constructs optical machines without memory, using engravings, reflections, and mechanical sequences in which images exist only as light passing through glass and are registered solely by the viewer’s eye, making the human body an active part of the work.

Her installations explore time, perception, and memory, drawing on personal memory fragments as well as influences from physics, astronomy, mathematics, and psychology. In an era when images can be created without having occurred, Khadivi’s work seeks to unfold image and time, drawing attention to the machines that shape our perception of the world.

Anatomy of an After, pt 1 consists of 29 glass sheets, several engraved with horizons of ruins from an abandoned town in Sicily – an echo of the silence left by an earthquake. Through the transparent layers, a stratified landscape emerges, where light moves between the remnants of what once was. A light source rotates like a helicopter propeller, inspired by the sensation of flying over a place or drifting through memories. The work captures a moment suspended between decay and stillness, where the contours of memory slowly dissolve into the glass.

Nicole Khadivi (b. 1998) graduated from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2024 and has also studied at Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her work has been exhibited at institutions both in Sweden and internationally and her short films have screened at film festivals such as the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Germany and the Gothenburg Film Festival. Upcoming exhibitions include India Art Fair.