About the project
“Lost Movement” by Nana Biakova
“Lost Movement” by Nana Biakova is an attempt to give inanimate and immobile beings the properties of the living and vice versa. Nana uses her own body as neutral material and explores the invisible relationship between her body and inanimate objects, boundaries, transitional properties, states, and patterns of memory.
At the end of 2023, Nana went to her hometown of Mykolaiv, which she visited for the first time after the full-scale invasion. The motionless missile cruiser “Ukraine,” the motionless construction cranes in the cityscape, the motionless things in the abandoned Mykolaiv apartment. All these objects and the city itself become a field for research, the result of which is a performance with videos shot in Mykolaiv and the action of the performer and author.
About the author
Nana Biakova is an interdisciplinary artist and performer, born in Mykolaiv. Her canvas is her bodily form, which she uses as a neutral material to delve into patterns of memory, boundaries and transitions, identity, and the relationship between the human body and the non-human. Nana often works in interaction with environments, lost or forgotten, temporarily unused by their essences.
She has an education in Ship Interior Design, obtained at the Mykolaiv University of Shipbuilding of Admiral Makarov. Since 2016, Nana has devoted herself to the practice of Ankoku Butoh, a Japanese avant-garde dance that emerged after World War II and is often referred to as the “dance of death.” She researched the history of Butoh through the Tatsumi Hijikata archive at the Keio University Art Center, and danced as part of the Butoh collective “Muteki-sha” under the guidance of Natsu Nakajima in Tokyo. After 3 years of emigration and a year of full-scale war, Nana returned to Ukraine. Currently based between Kyiv and Mykolaiv.
Video teaser
Presentations
- Mykolaiv, December 29, 2023. Mykolaiv Museum of Shipbuilding and Fleet.
- Berlin, February 19, 2024. Within the framework of the Cafe Kyiv event.
- Bucharest, March 29, 2024. TEATRELLI in collaboration with Fundația Gabriela Tudor.
- Kyiv, November 2024. Presented in the Khanenko National Museum, supported by the Performing Arts Fund NL.
- Wroclaw, November 24, 2024. Presented at the opening of the final laboratory, “What’s Next”.
- Mykolaiv, 10 May 2025. Presented as part of the “Performing Memory” project.
- On July 4, 2025, the performance was presented at the open-air museum Arte Sella, located in the village of Villa Strobele in northern Italy. The presentation is part of the Performing Memory project.
Credits
Production proto produkciia
Lead producer Olga Diatel
Executive producer Volodymyr Burkovets
Associate Producers Yuliia Parysh, Alona Odarenko, Iryna Onishchuk
Assistant Nata Zelenska
Communication Olga Diatel, Yuliia Parysh
Media coordination Kateryna Lukiashko
Copywriting Stanislav Vrublevskyi
Design of posters Yaroslava Kovalchuk
Photo Taisiia Kucherova, Anastasiia Telikova
Video documentation Mykolai Khlystal, Daria Sokolova
Financial management Volodymyr Burkovets, Anna Kyryliuk
Supported by
The work was implemented by proto produkciia foundation within the framework of the program Cultural Bridges: support of cultural figures from Southern regions of Ukraine, implemented by Insha Osvita with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative (UCBI).