DVAA Member since 2023
Dana Suleymanova
WEBSITE: danasuleymanova.com
About:
Dana Suleymanova (b.1996 Tashkent, Uzbekistan lives in Philadelphia) is an artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, drawing, performance and video. They received their BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 and have shown at Vox Populi, Icebox Project Space, Art League Houston and performed in Philadelphia’s FringeArts Festival, Experimental Action Festival, and Fusebox Festival. Her practice is a playful dissection of power structures through comedy and performativity. The work explores the intersection of capitalism and gender while unpacking the often clunky navigation of being a queer immigrant.
Artist Statement:
Originally from Uzbekistan, I am an artist living in Philadelphia working primarily in drawing, sculpture, moving image, and performance. My work is a playful exploration of queerness through wonky sculptural objects and cheeky performance. I look at the ways that objects and clothing are gendered, and utilize various materials and exaggerated scales to examine our relationship to them. Playing with fluidity, stiffness, texture, weight, and scale, these objects pose questions about our relationship to gender presentation. As I create materially diverse interpretations of clothing and accessories to unpack binary notions of our bodies, underwear has been a point of interest for me lately. Rendering these garments from a sculptural perspective allows me to study articles of clothing created to hide and accentuate certain curvatures of the body in order to gender and/or sexualize them.
Another theme I explore in my work is the interplay between artifacts of physical and digital realities. Alternating between the handmade and manufactured, I recreate clunky renditions of virtual spaces and technologies. The intentionally unrefined quality of these works explores the speed at which new technologies can become obsolete and therefore rendered useless. These works also serve as an examination of the lingering notion of failure and the fleeting notion of success. As a queer immigrant navigating a capitalist system, personal inadequacy, failure, and shame are ever-present as undercurrents in my work. In a social and political landscape where success is defined largely in monetary and patriarchal terms, my work explores what it means to succeed outside of these societal ‘measurables’.
