Nastassja Simensky

Studio B8

Nastassja uses fieldwork to explore and understand how complex issues around history and heritage, power and governance, ecology and the geopolitics of extraction are crystallised in specific geographies. Nastassja often works collaboratively with artists and non-artists including fishermen, archaeologists, powerplant workers, musicians, and ham radio enthusiasts to make authored and co-authored artworks. These include: poetic writing; place-specific performances on a cockle boat, in limestone quarries and a 7th Century chapel; sound work for radio and installation; using amateur radio to transmit and publish text and image; films.

Nastassja coordinates the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network. By engaging with the politics, methods, and processes of archaeology Nastassja reflects on the discipline of archaeology itself, as one of a range of modes of knowledge production that can inform embedded place-specific, experimental, and collaborative art practices.

Selected commissions and residencies include: Receiver, Focal Point Gallery; Rings on Water, FPG Sounds commission; Art and Archaeology residency at West Dean College of Art and Conservation; Critical Disturbance at Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: Listening to Non-Human Life, Theatrum Mundi; SHERDS, Nottingham Contemporary; Zu Gast bei den KunstVereinenRuhr, Urbane Kunst Ruhr; Material Culture Unearthed, In-situ Brierfield; Radiophrenia, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow.