Nana (Hwanhee Kim, 1980, South Korea) & Felix (Felix Nybergh, 1985, Finland) are an artist duo working together since 2012. Originally trained as a painter and a photographer respectively, they carry out projects in a wide range of different media, often in series, such as drawings, photographs, texts, video, three dimensional works, sound installation, etc.
Their work always stems from personal experiences and the need to contextualise them within the larger political and social reality we live in. The connecting thread within their admittedly eclectic projects is a yearning to understand their own place within an perpetually redeveloping, industrialised, man-built world. They often employ a photographical language, in a straightforward documentational manner, mixed with a touch of irony.
In their first two projects “SoMe” and “The Zone System” they explore how photographs are deployed in order to manipulate the public. Both projects focus on authoritative images, such as those used by law enforcement and the advertisement industry. By mimicking, recreating and repositioning, the projects expose the absurd nature of the image. The duo’s recent projects “Let There be Motorways” and “WEAST” have been carried out between the years 2015 and 2018, when they lived in South Korea. Conditioned by the peculiar history of this country both projects deal with a bizarre version of cultural appropriation. Nana & Felix have examined how a national project has been developed based on a foreign, misinterpreted and misunderstood imagery. Their response to such imagery resulted in producing a series of works disguised as a traditional art.
As visual artists, they aspire to expand the understanding of the ways their lives as both artists and citizens unfold within the society we live in. All of Nana & Felix’s projects, both past and future, always try to challenge their own prejudices, processing them with honesty, irony and humility.
