Nikolay Smirnov (born 1982) is a geographer, artist, curator, and researcher, working with geographical imaginations and geo-capital in art. Since 2023, Smirnov is a research assistant at documenta Institut (Kassel, Germany) and a post-graduate student at the University of Kassel. Co-curator of the projects Metageography (2014-2018) and Permafrost (Arctic Biennale, Yakutsk, 2016), he participated in the main projects of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial (2019, curator Xiaoyu Weng) and The 2nd Riga Biennial (2020, curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel).

Nikolay Smirnov

laboratory speaker

Geo-imaginations in relation to colonial infrastructure

SELECTED PROJECTS
Religious Libertarians’s Foundation
Shaman, Schismatic, Necromancer: Religious Libertarians in Russia
Death, Immortality, and the Powers of the Subterranean World (essay-exhibition)
Metageography – pdf catalog and research text
Left-wing Eurasianism: living in the name of the Common, Pernod Ricard Fellowship.
Permafrost

READING:

Donald Meining, “Geography as an art,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8, 1983, pp. 314-28

Wilson Harris, “Short story: The Fabric of the imagination,” Third World Quarterly, 12:1, 1990, pp. 175-186, DOI: 10.1080/01436599008420221

Nikolay Smirnov, “Ars sympathetic to S(s)pace,” in Letter to a Silk Road. Marjolijn Boterenbrood. 2022

Nikolay Smirnov, “XXIII. Meditations on the Tarot: Shaman,” in Enfleshed: Ecologies of Entities and Beings. Ed. By Kristiina Koskentola. Onomatopee 241. Forthcoming