Kika Nicolela is a Brazilian artist, filmmaker and independent curator based in Brussels who works with video and new technologies to question the stories people tell about the world and about themselves. She studied Film Studies at the University of São Paulo and completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts.
Her early work includes Windmaker, a 2007 interactive video installation made in Brazil.Her series Biographies, also known as Domitilas (2014-2016), follows several Brazilian women performers all named Domitila across video, photo installation and live performance staged with live projection and music.In Metanoia, filmed in the dungeon of a medieval Belgian abbey that inspired the prison in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, a two-hour video follows a confined man interacting with the light, stone and dust of his cell. Words drawn from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish are projected onto the stones of the exhibition room, recombined by software into ephemeral poems.In Elle et la Poule, a woman recounts testimony of sexual violence while interacting with a hen in an intercut audiovisual duet. The critic Simone Dompeyre described the work as showing “a woman who has a body and is not afraid of being herself or this body”.
Nicolela's videos and installations have been shown at institutions such as the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and Brussels' Villa Empain, and have screened at festivals including the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival and Videoformes.Since January 2022, Nicolela has also been creating, curating and collecting NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, and she was appointed curator for the platform objkt.com.,As objkt's curator she assembled the platform's presentation at the inaugural Digital Art Mile at Art Basel 2024, which included solo rooms for the artists Analivia Cordeiro and Regina Silveira.She also curated qubibi's solo exhibition “hello world” at Galerie Met in Berlin and wrote its accompanying essay, and hosts the interview series objkt Meets for the platform's blog.,Nicolela has continued to show her own work as a participating artist in group exhibitions on AI and the body, including HEK Basel's “The Second-Guess: Body Anxiety in the Age of AI” in 2025.
