Nurya Chana

Nurya Chana on her practice

I went to biology as a way of learning the basics of the physical world. I was always amazed that we can walk around and not understand what is going on in our bodies or what’s going on in another person. There are just so many things we are not aware of even in ourselves as we comport ourselves around the world. Biology led me directly back to art because of how it approaches body and life. It seemed severely limited. I’ve been developing an art practice that tries to use art as a way of studying life forms. It’s three part: I’m a performance artist, I make paintings and sculptures and I weave them together in installations. My education in biology pushed me towards art because there were so many pieces of information about the world, about life, that I was supposed to just write down and say, OK, yes. Empiricism is what’s considered a scientific way of learning, but science is not empirical anymore. It’s highly mediated by apparatuses, interpretation and perspective. What people are looking for can change what they see. So for me, I wanted to reinvestigate what is empiricism.

There’s nothing scientific looking about my work, because in thinking about what is empirical, observation-based, and objective, I ended up thinking about senses. It seemed important to me to take the human out of the center of everything. So I tried to integrate and stay out of my mind and go very much into reflecting a kind of reality that seems to pre-exist my thought process. In a way, it makes the materials I work with have agency and they become part of my reality. They get to declare their own reality because I am part of their logic. The process of making these works is performative in that it’s connected to my body and it’s sequential, so I wait for each mark, each move, and then when it happens to me, I do it. It’s quick moves in a slow way.

By doing this practice, I’m relearning how to learn and trying to access a different kind of objectivity than we’re taught. I feel like it’s important to do because what is humanity? Our humanity seems to always be resulting in a very bad and dangerous and hurtful version of itself. It makes me want to ask again, what is a human being, what are we doing here? What are we doing with each other? What are we getting wrong that makes us act in this way?