Nana Wolke at Fondazione Coppola

Some Girls Wander by Mistake 

Chapter I 

Summers used to compete with geological eras over which landscapes shift and warp, creasing the skin, making our voice raspier on cigarettes and bourbon. We’d sink deep into the olive green couch, yellow light exposing the dust lifting around us as we’d flip through a stack of soft porn books, amusing and arousing ourselves with cheap incomplete words of some dudes trying themselves at the same thing before us... 

This codependency of desire and shame is Nana Wolke’s criteria for the montage of scenes, each painting prolonging a moment in time. As Wolke turns 27, a year announcing itself as a beginning as much as a glorified end of it all, she revisits both personal and fictional short scenes, but most importantly, glimpses that can no longer be identified as either, lost to the seduction of cultural image and unreliability of one’s own memory. In a stubborn attempt to own up to this patchy reality, she works through topics of distance, sex, friendship, and obliteration. The starting point of each work is photographical re-staging of scenes focused on light and point of view, allowing for a dance, or sometimes a stumble at best, between narratives. 

Nana Wolke (Ljubljana, 1994) received her MA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University in London in 2021. She graduated with honours from the Academy of Visual Arts Ljubljana and completed her final year of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design Ljubljana through the study exchange programme at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Works by Nana Wolke have been exhibited at: AMU Gallery, Prague, CZ (2016); 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, SI (2016); G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, DE (2018); Kiribati National Museum and Cultural Centre, Tarawa, KI (2019); Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown, MA (2020); Shrine Gallery, New York City, NY (2021). Wolke has also been nominated for awards: OHO Young Visual Arts Award (2018), Ljubljana, SI; HIX Award (2019), London, UK; Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2021). She was awarded a scholarship by the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia (2019) and the Futura Scholarship (2020). In 2021 her work was exhibited at Proposition Studios, Daniel Benjamin Gallery, and Bangkok Biennial's UK Pavilion, in London, UK. From 1 October to 4 February 2021 Wolke will have a solo exhibition at Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza. Nana Wolke's work has been exhibited in the project space of VIN VIN Gallery, Vienna, where Wolke will have a solo exhibition in November 2021 in the main gallery space.