About
Daria Belkina is a contemporary artist working across textile, video and digital media, active since 2025. She lives and works in Saint Petersburg. In her first year of practice she has taken part in more than 8 international and Russian exhibitions and festivals (among them The Wrong Biennale 7, Form at CICA Museum, South Korea) and was shortlisted for CREA Open 2026 (Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Venice) with a Special Mention for the Quality of Research.
Before that, for more than a decade, she worked within the digital environment as a digital illustrator and ran a faceless YouTube channel — in an industry where success, and the very possibility of working, depends directly on reach and visibility. In 2017 and 2019 she received international awards in a character design competition for the arcade series Pump It Up by Andamiro; the characters she created are installed in arcade machines worldwide.
She graduated from the Institute of Space and Information Technologies, Siberian Federal University, with a degree in Information Systems and Technologies in the Media Industry (2019).
Her practice explores human presence within the attention economy and, more broadly, within any environment structured by people — the ambivalence between live presence and its disappearance into a trace, a version, an absent form.
Telegram @TekaHika · tekahikaart@gmail.com
Artist Statement
In Daria Belkina's works, human presence is tested by its collision with an environment that produces presence and cancels it with equal ease — the attention economy (feeds, algorithms) and, more broadly, any environment structured by people, even when that structuring is invisible from within. In textile, video and digital media, the artist searches for a material form for one and the same tension: the fragile threshold between live presence and mere trace, version, absent form. This way of seeing is shaped by more than a decade of practice: she ran a faceless YouTube channel and worked as a digital illustrator — in an environment where visibility and reach literally determine the possibility of existing. Here, human presence is a prolonged dwelling between states, where final transformation remains unattainable; and anxiety is a structural, background condition that such an environment produces.
At the core of the method is a single tension that takes a different form depending on the medium. In the textile works (Keep Calm and Carry On, Structure: Enclosure, and others), synthetic materials — organza, mesh, monofilament, constructed in the same way as the digital environment — collide with a live gesture. A pyrograph melts the fabric, sealing the edge: one attempt, with no possibility of undoing. This is an irreversible act of presence that leaves an absence behind it — in the place of the burn, a cut, a void, an absent form remains. In the video and digital works (Undo Error, Tender Glitches: Seamless), the same tension is tested within the digital process itself: where human presence — a voice, a face, an action — meets generation, restoration or synthesis that produce not the original but its version.
The environment in question is immaterial, and the processes that shape it are often invisible. Material and gesture give this construction a body — they make its action visible.
The collision remains unresolved: neither side wins. Her works do not offer a way out — they return a pause in which an ordinarily unnoticed environment becomes visible as a structure with a real effect on the person.