Diana Manukova (Akhad)
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Bio
My practice treats moving image as a space for inner experience, a method for turning private perception into a shared environment.
I sample my own footage into a visual library, sequenced so fragments form a narrative; colour and effects shape emotion and rhythm. Live, the work stays open: image responds to music in real time, and the audience becomes part of the composition.
Escapism is a strategy, not a retreat. I construct alternative realities to examine how the surreal and the real inform each other. “Magic” and “fantasy” are my starting point; I question where the line between them is drawn.
Growing up in Baku with Azerbaijani and Armenian roots, I experienced nationality as both concealed and imposed, and asked whether it should matter more than a person’s actions toward others. Identity can be a secret and a source of power; that tension still drives me. My visual language grew from Azerbaijani folk art, Teymur Daimi’s “Combinatorics of Chaos”, and from a love of Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism and Fauvism.
It invites thinkers, artists and minorities facing existential questions into mystery, hope and joy, where the surreal already lives inside reality.
