/ PRESENCE / DENSITY / TRACE /
PRESENCE / DENSITY / TRACE /
NiNA LUKISA
is a contemporary artist who explores how perception is experienced through the relationship between her Paintings, spAtial silhouettes and position, light, movemEnt, revealing that we are part of what we see and experience.
NiNA LUKISA
Nina Lukisa’s work begins with a simple question: What happens when we realize that our presence is part of what we perceive?
About
WORKS /
/ About
“What happens when we realize that our presence is part of what we perceive?”
Lukisa’s work is rooted in questions of perception, presence, and the conditions through which experience emerges. Working between painting and spatial intervention, she creates work and situations in which viewers become aware that what they perceive is shaped by their own position, movement, attention, and duration of encounter.
While the work operates through universal experiences of seeing, its origins are situated within a specific biography. Growing up between post-Yugoslav histories, African and European lineages, and contexts marked by political transition, questions of position, relation, and perspective were never abstract concerns but lived realities.
A background in political science further shaped an awareness that reality is rarely experienced from a single viewpoint. Social, cultural, and political worlds are constructed through shifting positions, competing narratives, and embodied experiences. This understanding continues to inform the work’s interest in perception as a relational process rather than a fixed truth.
Rather than illustrating biography directly, the works translate these experiences into perceptual situations. Images emerge and dissolve. Meaning shifts with movement. What appears depends on where one stands. In this sense, the work is less concerned with representation than with the conditions under which visibility itself comes into being.
At its core lies a simple but persistent question: What happens when we realize that our own presence is part of what we perceive?
Nina Lukisa lives and works in Germany.
While the work operates through universal experiences of seeing, its origins are situated within a specific biography. Growing up between post-Yugoslav histories, African and European lineages, and contexts marked by political transition, questions of position, relation, and perspective were never abstract concerns but lived realities.
A background in political science further shaped an awareness that reality is rarely experienced from a single viewpoint. Social, cultural, and political worlds are constructed through shifting positions, competing narratives, and embodied experiences. This understanding continues to inform the work’s interest in perception as a relational process rather than a fixed truth.
Rather than illustrating biography directly, the works translate these experiences into perceptual situations. Images emerge and dissolve. Meaning shifts with movement. What appears depends on where one stands. In this sense, the work is less concerned with representation than with the conditions under which visibility itself comes into being.
At its core lies a simple but persistent question: What happens when we realize that our own presence is part of what we perceive?
Nina Lukisa lives and works in Germany.
NINA LUKISA
Works /
Artwork as a spatial and perceptual instrument /
My work begins with observation that rooms are never neutral. They absorb for example gestures, moods, histories, and projections. Painting becomes a way to show how these invisible layers can be influenced through surface, rhythm, scale, and restraint.
The human-like silhouettes that recur throughout my work are not portraits or symbolic figures. They function as placeholders or neutral presences that allow viewers to project, recognize, or withdraw. They mark thresholds rather than identities.
I am interested in how work alters a space, how density shifts, how perception changes over time, and how viewer and work interact.
The human-like silhouettes that recur throughout my work are not portraits or symbolic figures. They function as placeholders or neutral presences that allow viewers to project, recognize, or withdraw. They mark thresholds rather than identities.
I am interested in how work alters a space, how density shifts, how perception changes over time, and how viewer and work interact.
My work is developed through a process of internal visualization, followed by repeated observation and selectively testing of how the finished work alters attention, presence, and perceived density within a room.
The paintings explore how space is perceived and transformed. These conditions are not fixed, but shift and overlap.
- Presence = marks the body as a point of orientation within space.
- Density = shapes the atmosphere, how space is felt rather than seen.
- Trace = describes what remains after presence: like a space holding memory.
High-resolution images are available upon request.
STUDIO NOTES /
NOTES ON PAINTING, PERCEPTION, SPATIAL PRESENCE, AND PRCATICE /
Notes on presence
My practice investigates presence as a spatial condition: how rooms register bodies, how attention shifts when something enters space, and how repetition produces resonance over time. The paintings function as perceptual instruments rather than representational images.
No. The silhouettes are deliberately non-specific. They operate as traces of presence and perceptual anchors that allow the viewer to sense how space responds to an implied body without directing interpretation toward identity or narrative.
This terms are used phenomenologically. They describe observable shifts in perception, density, rhythm, duration, attention.
Spirituality is not presented as instruction. If it appears, it does so indirectly, as byproduct of sustained attention and spatial awareness. The work does not ask the viewer to believe anything.
Through duration and repeated encounter. The effect unfolds slowly and in relation to the room, light conditions, and the encounter and movement of people through space.
Because space is never neutral. Rooms carry for example traces of use, movement, and expectation. Painting allows me to work with these conditions without illustrating them, making them perceptible rather than descriptive.
I hope, not an image exclusively, but a shift in awareness, a heightened sensitivity to space, presence, and perception.
