Dasha Ziborova
Artist based in New York, NY
ABOUT
Dasha Ziborova is a versatile multimedia artist born in St. Petersburg, Russia, who moved to New York in 1991. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Art on Paper, Outsider Art Fair, The Center for Book Arts, Governors Island, DVAA, and Space776. She is also the founder and curator of the Broken English & Other Languages series, which experiments with visual narrative and introduces authors and artists for whom English is a second language. Dasha’s artistic style varies depending on the project, spanning from collages and artist books to immersive performances.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am driven by an exploration of mortality, the ever-changing nature of time, and the fragility and beauty of the human experience in a moment. My work reflects on the tension between our longing for permanence and inevitable change, as well as how history—both personal and collective—plays out over time. I work in series, often beginning with a fully developed concept or scenario. Whether through books, a series of paintings, or costume creations that encourage participants to embrace their inner monsters, I experiment with various media to express these themes.
In My Inner Frankenstein series, I explore memories, the process of aging, and the concept of family as an ever-changing organism, marked by fragility and mortality. The faces and body parts used in collages are those of my husband, my son, and myself. The animals in the mix come partially from Slavic folklore, where a bear—an anthropomorphic deity, also known as Misha (Mikhail)—shares a name with my husband. As our body replaces itself with a new set of cells every 7 to 10 years, are we monsters that devour ourselves with every passing moment? Or like stop-motion animation, do we leave traces of billions of moments past, present, and future, which we could revisit, if only we knew how?
Website: www.dashaziborova.com
Instagram: @realtimeinink