Niki Danai Chania
Niki Danai Chania is a multi-disciplinary artist and creative director based in Amsterdam and Paris. Her fiction-based practice merges sculpture with textual and visual narratives, blending personal experiences, encounters, and dreams with mythology, folklore, and pop culture. A central theme in her work is monstrosity arising from social and environmental injustices. She reclaims monsters as symbols of empathy and challenges to societal norms, beings caught between self and Other, life and death, sanity and madness, exposing pressures imposed by social, political, and economic systems.
Connecting ancient and contemporary struggles while bridging reality and fiction and darkness with beauty, Chania focuses on materials and processes that allow the abject to take over. Dark silver glazes spread across terracotta bodies, corrosion and rust consume steel surfaces, or rough scratches carve antiheroes and creatures onto gold. She has presented her work at the Corsica Biennale, Onassis Foundation (Athens), Theoharakis Foundation (Athens), Delvis Unlimited (Milan), Basia Embiricos Gallery (Paris), Blender Gallery (Athens), Centrum (Berlin), KEIV Gallery (Athens), Saigon (Athens). She has participated in residencies including Onassis AiR and European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in the Netherlands, and in fairs and festivals such as Art Miami, CTM/Vorspiel and 48 Stunden Neukölln in Berlin, Dutch and Paris Design Week, KRAMA and Xenofestival in Greece, Alcova Milan.
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