Nikita Sacha is a multi-disciplinary artist whose body of work spans installation, performance, photography, sculpture, and painting in different media.

She earned an MFA in painting from the Academy of Art in San Francisco, CA, in 2017.

She has been exhibiting for over twenty years and has had several solo shows, the first of which was in 2009. She has also participated in multiple juried and invitational group exhibitions in the US, Europe, and Asia. Two of her pieces were displayed in the curatorial venture “On Walking Away” in Venice, Italy. Her work has been in the National Portrait gallery and was part of the touring exhibition for the 2018 BP Portrait Award. It was one of the paintings chosen from thousands worldwide at the most prestigious portrait painting competition in the world.

In 2019, right before the apocalypse, she completed a residency in Zhejiang, China for which she made a site-specific installation made with local materials. It was a piece that dealt with the construct of the “fairy tale princess” and unpacks the burden of societal expectations on women. The project concluded in an art fair displaying work by artists from different parts of the world.

Currently back in the Philippines, she is continuing to examine themes such as distance and memory with the use of new media, the digital world, and cyberspace. She opens up “://Portal” on Kumu as part of this exploration.

Statement

I am interested in relationships and their emotional dynamics— how we subject each other to a kind of destruction. Often drawing from cultural and personal mythologies, my work touches on a certain melancholia and the quiet violence of being.

My current ongoing series, “Ang Mahabang Gabi Ng Iyong Liwanag” (The Long Night of Your Light) are of abstracted portraits that explore personal relationships conducted over long distances. Inspired by the need to communicate with home via video call, having relocated to a different country while pursuing my MFA, I interpret frozen images of the calls during moments of failing internet connection. I use this as a visual for disconnection and separation, both emotional and physical; an experience now widely shared since the onset of this dystopia.