For art lovers, there’s only one way to do it during Art Week’s growing lineup: Cloning. However, since we are not there yet, the only option seems to be a strict selection of shows to attend among the plethora of exhibits. In Paris last month, among the whirlwind of new voices, major retrospectives and multiple art fairs across the arrondissement, I chose one that allowed me to slow down and really see: “UMBRA” Nika NilovaIts solo exhibition, on view until December 19 NIKA Project Space In the commune. (Romainville’s gallery cluster has become a hotspot for art outside of Paris, home to some of the city’s most exciting galleries.)
Stepping into the deep blue of the gallery one enters a dimension where time has stopped behaving. Nilova’s works appear like large, strange creatures – or perhaps relics that bridge ancient rituals and urban remains. On one side of the space, vitrines display glass vessels reminiscent of Roman funerary urns. On the other side, ancient stair banisters twist into loops replicating the infinity symbol. The exhibition’s title—Latin for “shadow”—captures the essence of the artist’s world: half-visible, partially erased. What once was and what might be come together in the possibility of something coming again.
For Nilova, whose practice has long explored the afterlife of objects, “UMBRA” marks the depth of what she calls “reverse archaeology.” Instead of excavating the past to preserve it, he plays with decay, forcing time to turn back on itself. “Time is folded. It collapses and expands; it’s non-linear,” he tells the observer, slowly caressing one of his handrail sculptures. “Really, my installations are processes of mid-transformation. Sculpture to me is a temporary solidification of a flow.” This is what his work says – if not the rigor of thought, then certainly the execution of the flow of logic.
A petite, elegant woman wearing a gamine blue beret, allows herself to be carried by blue chains and stitches of patterns unseen throughout the human realm. In his thought, he moves easily from alchemy to ecology, from etymology to entropy. “I really believe in the spirit of matter,” she says. “Everything has its own rhythm, its own agency. Wood breathes, glass cracks, metal corrodes. Things move even when we can’t see them.”
This conviction – that which remembers – underlies the exhibition’s centerpiece: sculptures made of handrails salvaged from demolished staircases. The wood, mostly mahogany imported during the colonial period, has passed through countless hands over the past hundred years. “The handrail is the meeting point between the human body and the architecture of the space,” Nilova explains. “It’s molded into the palm, extruded on an architectural scale. When it’s touched, it collects microscopic bits of skin, hundreds, maybe thousands, of human DNA. So each piece becomes a collective portrait.”
He points to a loop consisting of three spiral flights of stairs from London’s St James’s tube station, now twisted into a shape that symbolizes infinity and the Ouroboros, the alchemical serpent devouring its tail. “The ouroboros is about eternal recurrence, the cycle of life on earth,” he says “These works lead you into an endless cycle of repetition. They speak of continuity, the flow of matter through time.”
The handrails remain untreated, their stains and cracks intact. The artist invites me to touch them and feel the worn grooves where long-gone palms once rested, scars of decades of human passage. “It is impossible not to think about the colonial trajectory of the wood, once part of the tree that stood for centuries in the forests of South America before being carved into the domestic narrative of Europe,” Nilova said. “I like the idea of tapping into a larger flow that started before me and will continue long after.”
There is something deeply human and cosmic about the way Nilova describes her work. He often speaks of touch as a form of knowledge and of sculpture as a gesture stretched through time. “When you reassemble a staircase, you choreograph the absent body into space. In the absence of people, their ghosts remain as vestigial memories,” she reflects. This sense of haunting runs throughout “UMBRA”, where appearances and disappearances intertwine. “Once objects are freed from function, they acquire new, abstract meaning. Absence and presence are infinitely tied together; it depends on which way you look at the object.”
In one corner, a bunch of small, rough glass bottles sparkled. These are Nilovar lachrymatorys—glass flasks modeled after ancient Roman tear catchers, believed to accompany the dead in the afterlife. He reconstructed them using glass-making recipes uncovered during research at the Warburg Institute in London. “I wanted to make glass the way it was first made,” she says. “Sand, mixed with ash, is hardened with lime. Without modern stabilizers, the glass becomes soluble.
Each flask, she explains, has its own tears. During the exhibition, they gradually turned white and disintegrated, interacting with moisture in the air until they returned to dust. “It’s a transformation cycle, from solid to liquid to air. A time-measuring device, like ancient Rome. When the tears evaporate, the mourning ends. I like that it’s about disappearance; the work enforces its own undoing.”
This idea of air as material—perpetuating the invisible act of breathing—is echoed in many of his pieces, including a set of black-glass eyes inspired by 18th-century medical models. The pieces resemble obsidian, absorbing and reflecting light, looking at once ancient and futuristic, like a cross between a Vietnamese lacquer vase and a Star Wars prop.
Concepts of sight and perception were further developed during her residency at Sir John Swain’s Museum, where Nilova was fascinated by how mirrors and reflections change space. “Swain built a house like an organism, and he filled it with mirrors, debris, fragments. You never know where you are; it’s almost like the sight is detached from the body,” he recalls. “It feels like being inside someone’s consciousness.”
This idea of partial vision – of perceiving through shadows – informs “Umbra”. “An Old English word, Mayan, meaning eyes partially closed,” she explains. “That’s where the ‘mystery’ comes in. Looking at the world with half-closed eyes you can appreciate its strangeness. Sometimes, when you see less, you understand more.”
Although research and speculation underpin Nilova’s practice, her approach is intensely physical. “I don’t use any digital programs,” he says with a laugh. “Everyone is making art with AI now, but I didn’t even know how to map a shape on a computer! I like to work by hand, like to collect mistakes. When I collaborate with glassblowers, I say to them, ‘Can you do that wrong?’ Because work finds its life in mistakes.” What fascinates him is not correcting those flaws but allowing them to co-exist. “History is full of misunderstandings. Every interpretation leaves a mark like silt. I like to fold that chain of meaning back on itself.”
This insistence on imperfection links Nilova to artists who see entropy not as decay but as creation. He mentions philosophers Reza Negarestanicomposition of secret tenderness, which “describes the politics of decay as flexible architecture.” “He writes that decay reconstructs itself in the process of its own destruction,” she says. “I like the idea that undoing itself is a generative act.”
This vision always belonged to Nilova, even when she knew she wanted to be an artist. As a child he used to collect stones and shells. “I was fascinated by how much time was put into one small piece. You could go through time just by touching it.” That early fascination has matured into an artistic language where the material itself is the storyteller. “As an artist, I feel like a carrier, a helper. My work always starts with finding something. It’s about continuing what’s already there,” Nilova says.
From the NIKA Project space in the damp Parisian weather, through the red-brick cluster of Comunuma’s galleries, I felt momentarily at peace—briefly satisfied my desire to clone myself and attend three openings at once. The artist’s words stuck in my mind: “Everything is constantly undoing itself. It has no final form, only constant transformation.” I pondered this for a few minutes before heading down the stairs to the Romainville-Carnot metro. The train came at full speed; The mechanical door opened with a loud metallic snap. Linear time – the world of matter – began again.
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