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Niya B

Niya B is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersections of visual art and performance. She employs video, soundscapes, text, live acts, and immersive installations to explore themes of ecology, (trans)gender embodiments, class, mythology, and the knowledge held in the land and the performing body. Her work, rooted in personal experiences, aims to create intimate, meditative spaces that connect diverse audiences beyond representation and political polarization. Niya has exhibited across the UK, including at Tate Britain, CCA Glasgow, and Site Gallery, and internationally at events such as Venice International Performance Week, Visioni Del Sud (Italy), the 5th and 8th Thessaloniki Biennale and the 2023 European Capital of Culture (Greece), and the 5th Moscow Biennale (Russia). She has received support from Arts Council England, the British Council, Jerwood Arts and the Cultural Institute Leeds among others. Niya holds an MA in Landscape Architecture from the University of Sheffield and is currently pursuing a funded practice-as-research PhD at Kingston University’s School of Art in London on ecology and gender.

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Related Projects

Intimate Threads

BY NIYA B

Intimate Threads is a simultaneous ritual across continents, emerging from an online collaboration between artists Bunny Cadag and Niya B. The artists follow the common threads that connect them across continents, particularly the pre-Christian mythology and cultural and spiritual traditions of the Philippines and Greece. Bunny Cadag deploys her performative alter ego Vera Maningning to weave a trans-personal journey of decolonisation and healing. Through ritualistic dancing and the art of doll-making, she invokes the spirit of the Snake Woman, the hybrid offspring of Niya B’s mythopoetic practice, which is inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Tiresias. In challenging the confines of colonial and patriarchal narratives, the artists cohabit a space of possibilities for trans-local and trans-cultural entanglements. Amidst the global climate crisis and struggles for transgender rights, they articulate a new mythology that embraces the diversity of genders and the interconnectedness of all species.
Ekdysis

BY NIYA B

A snake dreams of a human. And vice versa. In Greek mythology, the seer Tiresias was transformed into a woman for seven years for allegedly disturbing two copulating snakes on Mount Kyllini, in Greece. Counteracting the linear, patriarchal way of manufacturing history, Niya B’s mythopoesis layers mythology, personal history and multi-species entanglements to retell the Tiresian myth through a poetic and performative journey of transformation. Ekdysis is a scientific term referring to the process of shedding the external layer of the skin in reptiles. In this work, Niya B executes her own ekdysis by shedding the imposed identities of nation, religion, class and gender. In this process, she engages in three ritual actions by performing a cathartic rite of passage on the top of the mountain, by stirring the layers of history hidden in the tranquil waters of the Lake Stymphalia, and by eventually finding embodiment in the form of a snake-woman. SHORT DESCRIPTION (if needed) Inspired by the myth of Tiresias, Ekdysis is a contemporary mythopoetic journey exploring personal narratives of gender transition and nonhuman kinship-making on Mount Kyllini, in Greece.
I Was Once the Snake Woman

BY NIYA B

The performance acts as a metaphor for the possibility of a resilient identity in a fast-changing world of political extremes, climate uncertainty, species extinction, and the fetishization of nature. It is an investigation of serpent mythologies, fashion’s fascination with the animal world, and the contradictions inherent in imitating the skin pattern of a species that humans both fear and kill. Niya embodies the Snake Woman—a hybrid offspring inspired by the metamorphic ancient Greek myth of Tiresia. The hybrid creature glides between captions from online fashion videos and lines taken from Snake Poems by Margaret Atwood. “…to talk with the body is what the snake does...” Margaret Atwood. After Heraclitus. In Interlunar. 1984 “…if you monochrome the print If you abstract the print You sort of take the danger Take the heat Take those messages away from the animal print You’ve just left with this nice idea of it Without of it being too scary…” Jess Cartner-Morley. How to dress: animal print. The Guardian. 8 November 2013.