Nika Schmitt (LU) has been working as a freelance artist since 2017. During her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Maastricht (BA, 2017), she began working on site-specific projects, for example at the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Senegal – dak’art 2016, performed as a vocalist in the experimental music group Otomax and founded the fashion line Dominik together with two colleagues, Mike Moonen and Don Possen. In 2018, she was awarded first prize in the student competition for installative sound art ‘bonn hoeren — sonotopia’, where she presented her work ‘locus motus’. In 2019, she began her Master’s degree at the ArtScience Interfaculty at the Royal Academy in The Hague (NL). In 2021, Nika Schmitt received the ArtScience Master Prize and completed her studies with the work ‘Loop’. In 2020/21 she took part in the international exchange project sonic explorers of the Beethovenstiftung Bonn in Dakar (SE) and Bonn (DE). Since then, among others, exhibitions in the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania, New York City..
Objects that are set into motion sonically and mechanically are recurring elements in her electromechanical installations and kinetic sculptures. She often uses them in the form of multiplications in order to create multisensorial environments that interact with the exhibition and presentation space and that can also generate confrontations and amplifying effects. Visitors are actively drawn into the piece. Schmitt has a special interest in feedback mechanisms and chaotic behavioral patterns of kinetic objects. In her piece, ‘Radau Radar‘ (Annexe22, Luxembourg), for example, she focused intensively on special feedback effects in the physical space. Currently, Nika Schmitt is exploring energy conversions, abrasion and self-destruction in systems, all processes which can run their course very differently depending on the system and the composition of materials. She combines unstable feedback mechanisms with simple fundamental principles of physics, in order to simulate more complex and universal processes.