Biography
Nikima Jagudajev (1990) is a Brussels based artist and choreographer. Their performance-based work is a collaborative act of building worlds in which unexpected encounters happen through various, often game-like structures.
Jagudajev works with and assembles material that becomes contra-normative infrastructure. At play are dance phrases that fold in on themselves infinitely, snacking and napping, as well as game objects such as a deck of cards and a huge jigsaw puzzle. An expansive deployment of the practice of alteration by sewing machine and cross-stitch, from the production of artworks to the modification of visitor’s clothing, alters the space. In the realms of film, documentary, video game, and performance, archetypes and avatars, be they cosmic characters or 3D renderings, traverse portals and thresholds both digital and choreographic. Doodles and doom metal appear in unconventional proportions and distortions, and contribute to the mythopoetic lore forever getting re-constructed.
Re-schooling, or how play, as an ordered activity that has its end within itself, subverts the institution, is the core concept of Jagudejev’s artistic practice. Their works are made for the performer and visitor to find fulfillment, in the sense of playing and sharing an experience of deviance. Social relations are conceived as spatial relations; spaces are transformed through social interaction.
Always durational, the disruptive and unfamiliar nature of these large-scale long-form megaworks ask for the interactions that take place to be similarly unfamiliar. Performers and visitors hang out, in one way or another, within the strange and unexpected nature of these constructed worlds. As people come and go, the space changes configurations, keeping the interactions from calcifying into socio-political norms, rendering the world specific, disorienting, and queer.
Jagudajev’s work is represented in the collection of mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna. Solo exhibitions of their work have been shown at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2025), mumok (2024), Accelerator, Stockholm (2024), WIELS, Brussels (2023), Shedhalle, Zürich (2022), and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2021). Other shows were held at Kiasma Theater, Helsinki (2025), Kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2020), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2019), MoMA PS1, New York (2018), Human Resources LA (2018), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017), and the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2017), as well as in the context of Scuola Piccola Zattere, Venice (2025), Beyond the Black Box at De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (2024), KAAP’s Dansand! Festival, Ostend (2023), kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels (2022), Material Art Fair’s Immaterial, Mexico City (2020), 89+ at LUMA/Westbau, Zürich (2017), and as part of the Marrakech Biennale, Morocco (2015).
Published work by Jagudajev includes « The Backstreet Boys » as part of Bergen Kunsthall’s Speculative Histories text commission platform (2021) and co-published by Karmaklubb*, « Relations of Unpredictable Encounters » in the Movement Research Performance Journal (2017) and « the landscape thinks itself in me » in Asad Raza’s Root Sequence. Mother Tongue (Walther König, 2018).
In residentie Basically
01.01.2023 – 01.01.2023
Basically is an ongoing live project by Nikima Jagudajev. It is a process based body of work that transforms with each iteration. It has taken the form of a two day durational performance, a recording studio, a residency, a schoolyard, a picnic on the beach and a six month exhibition. With each invitation, not only does the context change but so does the content as new collaborators with new input are invited into the process. Jagudajev is interested in social forms; social relations as spatial relations and how we assemble in fulfilling and considerate ways. They call their process based collaborative practice re-schooling, coming together and sharing devotions. A reconstruction of what so many of us—some more than others—were deprived of as children: the laughter that fills the halls between classes, locker decorations and secrets underneath the bleachers. Re-schooling requires the input of many artistic practitioners, sharing with one another their most impassioned selves, sewing relational threads, building strong bonds with themselves and others.
Harnessing the choreography of play as a framework, performers (Conduit) and visitors (Arrivor) are incorporated into an open-ended game. World building is aided by a group of artists who shape the playground with elements such as live music and ableton soundscapes, food, a deck of collectable cards called POWDER, Arcane Clothing, “crits” – art class critique turned oracle – nonlinear dance choreographies that fold in on themselves and unscheduled time that leaves room for contingency. These elements work as informal invitations to engage in different ways, shifting attention and offering agency and ontological transformation. This mythopoeic world is both serious and playful, enchanted with meaning and full of mods. One’s experience is determined by the games’ formal properties as well as the interaction of various interpreting subjectivities. Performers and visitors share this slippery universe, making and remaking the environment; a sociality of difference.
In residentie Whatever
18.04.2026 – 28.04.2026
For their development residency at C-takt, Nikima Jagudajev will work with collaborators Jordan Balaber, Salomon Leondard Poutsma, Amina Szecsödy, and Lester St. Louis on their next album called Whatever. In 2024 during their exhibition of Basically at mumok in Vienna, they began collecting recordings of visitors. Those who were invited were integrated through a card game called POWDER, where they received direction from “The Dealer” to join the “Celestial Ferryman” in the recording studio because the music realm of the particular card they pulled was open for a short period of time. Now, in the wake of that exhibition Jagudajev and their collaborators will use these recordings as jumping off points for the creation of new music, a song per card, which will not only become an album but will develop into the musical landscape of their next large scale performance work of the same title: Whatever.