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- Puhovyk (Down Jacket), 2025
Nika Shumeiko
Puhovyk (Down Jacket) emerged from a simple play on words. The object reproduces the form of a familiar garment but does not fulfill its function. Inside the transparent shell are poplar down, leaves, and branches collected from the urban environment.
The work originated from an intuitive gesture—a desire to give seasonal, fragile material a different form of presence. It exists on the boundary between the recognizable and the disproportionate: the natural assumes an artificial shape, while the familiar reveals its own fragility. In this tension, the object appears as an image, leaving open questions about its duration and meaning.
Nika Shumeiko (b. 2001, Reshetylivka, Poltava region, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian artist living and working in Kyiv. In 2023, she graduated from the Mykhailo Boychuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design, earning both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Monumental and Sacred Art.
Her practice operates at the intersection of graphic arts, painting, object-making, and installation. She combines traditional artistic media with natural and found materials—soil, clay, water, and plant fragments. In her works, the material functions as an equal partner in the creative process. The artist intentionally limits her control, allowing natural processes to shape the structure of the work. Her practice is centered on presence, memory, and spatial interaction, exploring the liminal space between the emergence of an image and its disappearance, where meaning is held within the material itself.
Shumeiko works in a studio located in the former Kyiv Institute of Automation and is part of the artist-run community at 22 Nahirna Street.
Awards
2022 — President of Ukraine Scholarship for Young Masters of Folk Art
Selected Collaborative Exhibitions
2026 — (UN)INTENDED GESTURES, Imagine Point, Kyiv (with Daryna Svyatun)
2025 — Between Roots and Shoots, KUT, Kyiv (with Anna Vekhnik)
Selected Exhibitions and Projects
2025 — NOI, Institute of Contemporary Art Problems, Kyiv
2025 — NOI, Bereznitsky Art Foundation, Kyiv
2025 — Nahirna 22. The Story of a Kyiv Artist-Run Space, Hotel Continental – Art Space in Exile, Berlin, Germany
2025 — Open Space, NAOMA Center, Kyiv
2024 — Visual Project Injection Art, educational program of Gogolfest Pokrova, Regional Museum, Zaporizhzhia
2024 — VII All-Ukrainian Competition in Contemporary Visual Art for Young Artists named after Nathan Altman (EU4Culture), Vezha Artinova, Vinnytsia
2020–2022 — Participation in national group exhibitions (NSHU, NSMNMU, Kyiv)