Eva Davidova walks the line between real and the absurd while layering virtual and live action. The issues in her work—behavior, cruelty, ecological disaster and manipulation of information emerge as paradoxes rather than assumptions, in an almost fairy-tale fashion. From holography and 3D sculpture to animation and Virtual Reality performance, her materials mix and mutate into each other, creating uncertainties.
She works with the displacement and manipulation of elements - spaces, words, and bodies. Dissociating meanings, and playing with visual paradoxes and unnatural movement, she questions the origin and purpose of an image or an action, taking events out of their routine, and confronting viewers with their own, not previously digested, interpretations.

Davidova’s work has been shown at museums, private galleries and public spaces in New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Oporto, Sofia and others. She is recipient of international awards and fellowships in the US and Europe. Her recent institutional solo exhibitions were at the Contemporary Arts Center La Regenta in Tenerife, and the Urban Video Project at The Everson Museum Facade, Syracuse, NY.
Davidova is also the art director for the Spanish film 'Sindrome', several short films, commercial TV spots, and has produced video pieces for musicians and architects. She is a graduate of the School of Fine Arts, Complutense University, Madrid. 


Alex Brahim essay on Eva Davidova

Eva Davidova's unclassifiable proposal, personal, intimate yet at the same time universal, is about the affections of the human character, the relationship between conscious/unconscious, and the individual-space-time dialectic.  By means of multiple mediums such as photography, video, animation, drawing, sculpture and holographies, Davidova raises the access to psychic parallel universes, where physical space and emotions centrifuge. Giving way to visions in which carnality emerges as cognitive and the break up brings about new synopses, in her piece organism, soul and matter compose an integral subject status as an inhabitant of (her) world.  Beings which jump into the emptiness breaking recognizable architectures, apologies and fairytales from the deepest intimacy of self representation or the capacity to fracture, literally, physical space in order to penetrate new mental labyrinths, to stabilize the coordinates of a new metaphysical cartography.  The affective load of her sensorial videos and animations, the sensitive dialogue of emotions in the matter of her holograms, the impressive multidimensional actions of her photography, or the surreal and evocative visions of her sculptural drawings, transport us to new spheres where knowledge, tragedy, helplessness, the search for serenity, exaltation, fury and violence all live together.  In this game of multiple integration that Davidova reconstructs from her own person, through beauty, character, femininity, and a suggestive carnality of her own style, room is made for stages where—like during a vigil—the limit that separates being asleep or awake is a diffused border, where the agitation and perceptive destabilization generate fleeting emotional surroundings. Through sharp micro-instant children of an agitated profusion, Davidova invites us along with her imagination, to recuperate the high definition that lives in the blurred place where the transit between the palpable and the oneiric occurs.    Rebeca Pardo essay on Eva Davidova 

What is matter made of? What are the relationships that we establish with space and the time we live (or don't live) on this planet really like?  These and other complex questions are hidden within the works in which Eva Davidova confronts us with scenes of rootlessness and searching, scenes of loneliness and disagreement... even though her images are so personal that at times they refer to our very own fears, ghosts, nightmares or dreams.  Liquid, solid and gas... the states of matter, with which Davidova plays, trying to alter (or maybe unmask) reality. In her piece, as though she were speaking about an alchemy treaty, liquid becomes ethereal, almost gaseous when it transforms itself into a hologram or a projected image that turns itself back into a solid above a bathtub.  And while this transmutation of matter is carried out, Eva Davidova fills us with questions, absurd paradoxes of pieces in which, as a means of self-reference, the artist plays with distortions of perception and something which hits us after the suspicion that reality and science are not able to give us all of the answers we look for or need (more so if the questions have anything to do with the essence of the human being).  In Davidova's piece, the body goes through the concrete while the flesh, bones, entrails, walls, pipes, glass or metal all end up as part of the same impossible, yet revealing image... because, finally: what is reality? Something that conventions have shown us over centuries whilst trying to rationalise the unknown? Or, with Modernity obsolete for some and dying for others, can we open our mind to other possible perceptions?  Davidova seems to suggest a question that is somewhat more complex: is it necessary to point out the borders between reality and fiction, between cold cement and carnal heat, between science fiction techniques and the type of language used to speak about the most intimate things, the most personal things, the things that make us submerge ourselves in the water in a bathtub or jump excitedly into nothing?  There has been a lot of talk of palimpsests recently. Talk of the anomie to refer oneself to these new pieces which have risen from the superpositions of layers, languages, styles and stories, sometimes remotely connected or blatantly unconnected, to a wild and unorganised aspect. An aspect with which current artists find the path towards the expression of interior worlds in which we get lost whilst wandering around 'non places' which, according to Augé, are dotted all around us.  Davidova, through her animations and holograms, gives a new sense to all of this with some images that seem to have been extracted from a postmodern 'cat's alley'. With or without deforming mirrors, Davidova creates a number of modern trompe l'oeils, which play with spaces that alter themselves before our eyes in an oneiric rhythm, which creates a fluctuant tempo.  The relationships between movement and time, or the lucubration as to whether movement itself is possible, have given light to important reflections on the history of humanity: from the paradoxes described in the lost texts by Zenón of Elea to the more recent texts by Deleuze. Davidova also contributes her own vision with works in which art seems to get infected by the time-space distortions from some current edition techniques; like those which Michel Gondry amazed us with in his famous videoclip of the Rolling Stones, or those which were previously known by many as having the 'Matrix effect', or on a more technical level 'bullet time'.  In this way, the turbulent relationships between real and filmic time disembark in art in order to contaminate the perception of a disturbing mutant space in which color is more an element of distortion or revelation. With a total control over saturation (or desaturation) and shine, Davidova gives us the necessary hues to make a sentimental trip which brings us out of the estrangement of digital photos and takes us towards the warm and dark intimacy of the holograms passing as moments of anguish, loneliness and doubt.  An explosive cocktail of recognizable and contemporary feelings and experiences, with which Davidova speaks in first person, from her naked self-reference. A direct language with which the artist most certainly looks for an alternative (a 'you' or an 'us') that is capable of opening her own naked matter to a message written in lights and shadows, a message in which the matter is transmuted by the thing which conceives dreams and nightmares, and in which key questions that hammer contemporary philosophy trapped in a so-called mundane tri-dimensionality in which there are fewer and fewer certainties, close themselves. Time, space, the relationship between a human being and his surroundings, the essence of movement? Questions that are difficult to put into words but which seem to open themselves as a result of the severe images of Eva Davidova.  Disturbing images, which take us to improbable places in tumultuous times in order to confront us with a chameleon-like reality whose comprehension passes as an understanding of our own relationship with the world.