Nika Kupyrova's solo exhibition at Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz In Austria.

Simulacra
Solo exhibition by Nika Kupyrova
Curated by Hemma Schmutz (Director Lentos Kunstmuseum)
Text by Denise Sumi 
June 6 – August 17, 2025
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz

Over the years, Nika Kupyrova has collected a large archive of images: .jpg downloads, .png downloads and screenshots. “I spend a lot of time on the Internet, which explains where many of the ideas for the Simulacra exhibition were born. One of the things about spending a lot of time online is that the seemingly playful nature of the pop-culture interpretations I encounter on the Internet is accompanied by an oppressive anxiety about the state of the world and a deep technological malaise.”
Ambivalent feelings such as euphoria and unease are not confined solely to the humanistic history of technology and that of the Internet, but also extend to phenomena which involve deviations in our perception of reality, such as in dream worlds. In the novel Despair (1932) by Vladimir Nabokov, the protagonist Hermann Karlovich describes a nightmare. In several phases of his dream he repeatedly encounters the likeness of a dog until he finally wakes up: “First there was a small dog; but it was more than just a small dog; a tiny pseudo-dog, very small, with minute black eyes like those of a beetle larva; it was white all over and quite cold. Flesh? No, not flesh, but rather lard or jelly, or perhaps the fat of a white worm, which also had a kind of carved, grooved exterior reminiscent of a Russian Easter lamb made of butter – repulsive mimicry [...] ... but then I finally woke up properly.” 1
Kupyrova’s ideas are mostly derived from pop-cultural, visual, creative or literary sources, utilising existing elements and translating these into artistic forms of expression. White dogs appear in various guises in the Simulacra exhibition: as a picture of a choker necklace made of small, plastic seed beads that form a white poodle; as a picture of a dog sculpture made of cream and blueberries on a plate in the fridge; as a picture of a white, somewhat deformed-looking dog pup-pet with a lopsided smile, a spangled collar and protruding floppy ears against a dark background. This depiction of Foo-Foo, the small white dog belonging to Miss Piggy from The Muppet Show, which made its TV debut in 1979, has been circulating as a meme on social networks for several years. The image is usually accompanied by the text: “Putting on my active listener face when I am actually knee deep in the association pool.”
Since Web 2.0, the creation of association chains has been a phenomenon that is increasingly characterised by a culture flooded with visual images. The concept of Web 2.0 first began to circulate in the early 2000s and refers to a change in the way the Internet is used, one that enables Internet users to share their own content such as videos, photos and artwork more easily and quickly via standard-based applications and platforms such as Flickr (since 2004), You-Tube (since 2005) and Tumblr (since 2007).

The four white dogs that form the main theme of the pictorial panels in Kupyrova’s exhibition also derive from digital images circulating on the Internet. This is indicated by their titles: C696879b62f37ed3d7f7d-0204c0d49b8.jpg, istockphoto-859896586-612x612.jpg, lhasa-apso-adult-white-black-and-gold-brindle.jpg and shih-tzu-studio_87557-24262.jpg. The files with the somewhat cryptic names originate from the artist’s archive and served her mother, Irina Kupyrova, herself a classically trained painter, as a template for the paintings. Simulacra was the first collaboration between mother and daughter. After Irina Kupyrova had painted the dogs, Nika Kupyrova added further elements to the wooden panels: paintings of corals, collages of shells, self-adhesive eyes or casts of a shoehorn hand. These are ironic set pieces from Naturalism and the horror genre, and they stand in for the uncanny or the organic. While the shape of the coat of arms refers to a lineage, such as a family crest, the actual image can potentially be removed from its frame at any time, thus revealing a “window” with additional content. This is a feature that the wooden panel has in common with every browser window.
As in Nabokov’s novel, the white dogs act as markers for a transition into an altered perceptual space. The hypnagogic gate, the transitional moment between wakefulness and sleep, is a classic threshold state in which the perception of sound and time frequently changes or hallucinations occur. Alectrona, the metal sculpture depicting an eye, symbolises the emergence from a state of semi-sleep. The motif of the wallpaper, a sunset, likewise symbolises a threshold state of this kind. The wallpaper intensifies atmospherically into a “cloud of images”, whereby Kupyrova reproduces the individual digital images using the aesthetics of pseudo-analogue black and white screen printing. Originally, these were poor images circulating on the Internet: “The dismal image is a copy that moves. Its quality is poor, its resolution inferior. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is the ghost of an image [...] that is compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, copied and transferred to new media”. 2
The poor image is a copy without an original. The cultural theorist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, described this increasing lack of reference since Post-modernism in his work The Precession of Simulacra (1978). According to Baudrillard, simulation constantly calls into question the “difference between what is ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’”.3 For Baudrillard, simulacra is “a game of illusions and fantasies”.4

The headpieces of Cerastes, Eidolon, Hyperborean, Hypnus, Lyco and Orphe are the result of a similar mechanism in which the order shifts between the real and the imagined, between copy and likeness. The white busts are mere copies of copies of copies. They were created in Irina Kupyrova’s studio and serve as models for drawing studies. The pieces crafted by hand from papier-mâché imitate organic materials: horn, wood, feathers, coral or mycelium.5
From a creative perspective, Kupyrova draws on methods used in digital game design: “Assets” are digital resources that are generated or used in the design process. These include 3D models, textures, colour palettes, audio and video files as well as animations. Click by click, code by code, the digital world is brought to life by means of illusion mechanisms.
The analogy to “world-building” is particularly evident in the work Lyco, which was also designed in collaboration with Irina Kupyrova. In this case, the colour palette has only been partially applied, allowing the model and animated character of the mycelium to take centre stage. It is not the only analogy with “Game Cultures”: Cerastes is a snake with horns from Greek mythology, a classic trickster figure, as well as a character in several online games. Eidolon, another figure from Greek mythology, is the spirit of a living or dead person, a phantom, but it also appears as a character in the game Minecraft and the online role-playing game Warframe. Lyco and Orphe are siblings from Greek mythology who ultimately turn into stones.
Finally, there are growing indications in the eponymous video piece Simulacra that the digital realm is not a sterile, dehumanised and alienated place but, in the sense of Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg, “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organ-ism, as much a creature of social reality as of fiction”.6 The two animated characters Eidolon and Orphe are the avatars that stand at the edge of the animistic digital cosmology featured in Kupyrova’s exhibition.
The sound design of the video work, which assumes a strange and eerie presence within the exhibition, was created by the producer Ai fen. The combination of human voice and digital processing is yet another reference to the transhumanist concept of the connection between man and machine, nature and culture.

In a pseudo-organic construct composed of sunset, corals or mycelium, Simulacra unfurls a stage for a digital, animist cosmology consisting of jpg downloads, screenshots and avatars that serve as markers for the transition to a more fanciful world. This world is a hybrid of reality and fiction, mechanical and organic elements. It is the world we live in, where the boundaries between what we perceive as real or fictional are constantly shifting. It is a phenomenon that is currently exemplified by images generated by deep learning models – a method that the artist consciously chooses not to employ, but but at best to imitate.

1 Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (original Russian title Otchayanie), Rowohlt, 2017, ebook, 132.
2 Hito Steyerl, “Zur Verteidigung des ärmlichen Bildes” [In Defense of the Poor Image]. In: CINEMA Buch #64, 2019. https://www.filmexplorer.ch/essays/zur-ver-teidigung-des-aermlichen-bildes/ (29.3.2025)
3 Jean Baudrillard, Agonie des Realen [The Agony of Power]. Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1978, p. 10
4 Baudrillard, 1978, p. 24
5 Mycelium [from Greek *mykēs; plural mycelia], mycelium, fungal deposit, myce-lium, fungal network of (mostly branched) vegetative fungal threads.
https://www.spektrum.de/lexikon/biologie/mycel/44577 (31.03.2025)
6 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. In: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 149.

Photo: Janine Schranz

Video teaser: https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1012665676

Many thanks to all collaborators
Performers: Teuta Jonuzi and Trin Alt @teutajonuz @trinaltvajd
Make up: Dragana Suljic #draganasuljic
Camera: Ulrich A. Reiterer @ulrich.a.reiterer
Post-production: Patrick Topitschnig @topitschnig
Soundtrack: Ai Fen @i_am_aifen
Paintings in collaboration with Irina Kupyrova