Sofya Skidan’s work resists the binary legacies of modernism: the separation of body and mind, of nature and culture, of science and spirit. At a time when more and more artists are turning to speculative cosmologies to refuse Western rationalism as the only path to knowledge and counter hyper-rationalised life under late capitalism, Skidan’s practice stands apart in how it avoids both primitivist romanticism and techno-utopian materialism. Instead of retreating into nature-as-sanctuary or embracing disembodied digital abstraction, Skidan insists on the inescapable entanglement of the two. Her work operates within contaminated, hybrid terrains where human, natural, and machinic agencies co-exist.

In this configuration, the artist becomes a kind of intermediary — a contemporary shaman — a mediator across domains that no longer hold clear boundaries. Just like the shaman traditionally mediates between worlds: human and divine, natural and supernatural, visible and invisible, so does the body in Skidan’s work, porous and unstableals, moves between liminal terrains. 

In What do you call a weirdness that hasn’t quite come together? (2019–24), a three‑channel video installation presented in the “Primordial Sound” section of the 15th Gwangju Biennale (curated by Nicolas Bourriaud), Skidan’s “avatars” continuously mutate in-between environments. Sometimes it is nature — actual, filmed environments — into which the artist places herself. She merges with the landscape, shedding morphology of human movements in favour of a shared logic, as if in collaboration with nature’s own intelligence. Sometimes the setting is entirely constructed: an artificial terrain shaped by digital tools. Here, a third agent enters the scene — artificial intelligence — completing the exchange between the human and the natural and therefore completing the shamanic ritual.

Skidan enters a lineage of artists who positioned themselves as intermediaries between individual perception and wider systemic shifts. The idea of the artist-as-shaman has circulated in post-war performance, particularly around figures like Joseph Beuys and, more recently, Marcus Coates. As Victoria Walters has explored,both artists used ritual, animal symbols, and healing to address cultural and ecological crises. Yet where these artists worked with symbols drawn from nature and mythology (e.g. Beuys’s use of felt and fat, or Coates’s animal imitations) Skidan, in contrast, operates in a post-digital context. 

In this entangled terrain, Skidan emerges as what we might call an artist as cybershaman: a figure who channels between organic, post-organic, and digital realms. Her cybershaman — presented through a multiplying series of avatars — acts as an intermediary within what Timothy Morton calls the “mesh”: an ecology without edges, where every entity is connected across scales and temporalities. In the “thickened present” described by Terry Smith — where multiple temporalities coexist and linear time has collapsed — Skidan’s cybershaman becomes a guide. She walks us through the unstable now, helping us sense and make peace with its overlapping realities, fragility and precariousness of our bodies and fluctuations of identities that we no longer control. 

Bibliography:
Bourriaud, Nicolas, curator. 15th Gwangju Biennale: Soft and Weak Like Water. Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2024.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Skidan, Sofya. “What Would You Call a Weirdness That Hasn’t Quite Come Together?” Artist’s statement. Accessed July 2025. https://sofskidan.com/2024/11/what-would-you-call-a-weirdness-that-hasnt-quite-come-together-2/
Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Walters, Victoria. “The Artist as Shaman: The Work of Joseph Beuys and Marcus Coates.” In Art, Faith and Modernity, edited by J. de Vries and L. Jansen, 175–192. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.