Nastya Akimova
Actions transform into photographs, intertwining gestures, images, and words. Nastya Akimova’s art is both raw and powerful. It represents a process of resolutions that resembles survival, extending beyond the “here and now” to become daily practice.
Actions transform into photographs, intertwining gestures, images, and words. Nastya Akimova’s art is both raw and powerful. It represents a process of resolution that resembles survival, extending beyond the “here and now” to become a daily practice.
Polaroids, digital prints on office paper, and marker texts are the privileged medium through which Nastya tells of a moment of personal collapse. Stability trembles, and her works document this state of impermanence. Like a triptych, the three selected artworks outline the emotional pain embodied in the physical one. They show the verbose uncertainty of intertwining possibilities, creating a mental fog. They represent a scrawled statement drawn in one go on a plastic bag. Nastya’s works are urgent confessions rather than explicit requests for help. They are personal stories that are not confined to individualism. Her art practice is intimate but not individualistic. It speaks to the public by resonating with shared experiences, arousing empathy, and creating a bond. We’ve all felt bleeding, confused, and scared at least once, wishing to see ourselves reflected and held in another human being.
Fragility and distress can also be perceived at a tactile level. The techniques and choice of precarious materials echo the issue of impermanence: wrinkled paper, smudged ink, plastic packaging, handwritten text on paper, and collaged debris mirror the rebuilding process, blurring the line between tactile artifact and fragmented memory.
The artist’s mixed media works reject the resolution narrative as a final goal, the successful end of a struggle; instead, they counterpose the concept of healing as a process to be integrated into everyday life. Resolution is never something concluded in Nastya’s art. It is experienced in everyday life, in our choices with our bodies, emotional states, and actions. There is no completion: only a collage of debris and scattered words which compose a larger and more complex picture.
Nastya’s artistic production follows the path of other great diaristic and confessional female artists, who have made their biography and ability to investigate personal emotional states their stylistic signature. Like Nan Goldin, Nastya’s polaroids are immediate; they share unpolished situations with the public. The bloody faces of Gina Pane and Ana Mendieta also echo in some images. In common with these great names of the art scene, Nastya’s works are also brutal in their truthfulness and tactile immediacy.
Nastya Akimova’s exploration of trauma and its disruptive effect on the perception of identity makes her a promising artist and interpreter of our times. Emerging from the grassroots photographic community in Moscow, she founded the art collective Paduga and organized independent exhibitions in Russia and Serbia. Her unrefined sharing of personal moments reminds us of the unresolved nature of healing. Resolution is not tidied up but a question traced with a black permanent marker on a transparent, ephemeral surface.
Nastya Akimova is the Gold Artist of the ArtAscent Resolutions call for artists. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the 2025 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal Resolutions issue.
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