DAYANA MATASHEVA

Slop Mona Lisa, 2026
Oil on canvas
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Daily Average, video performance, duration varies between two and eight hours, 2025-2026

Daily Average is a series of performances that measure a person's average phone usage. Each performance directly correlates to the number of hours a participant spends on their phone daily. They scroll through social media, listen to podcasts, chat, work, trade, and participate in countless other activities. I ask them to keep the sound on as a narrative throughline of the piece. Some people are more active than others, throwing their feet up the wall, drawing circles with their legs, stretching, yawning, and fidgeting. Others remain almost entirely still and barely produce any noise.

I conceived the performances as tableaux vivants, drawing on the rich history of screen tests and slow cinema, from Andy Warhol's Sleep to Vanessa Beecroft's living paintings. Constrained by the bed and somewhat mindful of the Procrustean borders of the frame, they adopt poses from famous frescoes, paintings, films, and anime. At some point, they may forget about the mechanical mediation,  allowing for accidental slippage of the personae.

I am not interested in the contents of the phone—the sheer volume of information it contains or may hypothetically contain seems exhausting and irrelevant. What matters is that people look at these technologies (while being observed by them), interact with, and adapt to them. What I capture is this slow incremental growth, like a slow-motion footage of a waking flower.

I have shot nine performances so far, eight of which are solo and the remaining one featuring two participants at once. Eventually, I plan to shoot one hundred; however, due to their length, these videos are time-consuming and requireplenty of storage and precise setup. I am taking a hiatus from shooting in February and March.

Contact to participate.











Autofiction, print on paper, 2025

Is it normal to feel suicidal during hangovers in your thirties, best export settings in DaVinci Resolve, travel grant for Canada Council, will I get evicted, do I need a lawyer, can I get a free lawyer who wouldn’t sabotage my case, is this artwork good, can you write about it like an e-flux staff writer, will the US let me in, will the US let my husband in (he's Mexican), does my friendgroup secretely hate me, am I pregnant, mini facelift cost comparisons across the world, cocaine calm-down tips, the meaning of life, God, Lacan, Freud, what’s wrong with my father, am I becoming my mother, is my cat ill, are cats neurodivergent, summorize Fang Noumena like I’m four, best true crime shows... roughly 1,600 conversation titles (the above ones have taken some creative liberty) extracted from my history with ChatGPT over the past three years. Edson and I have grown accustomed to it together, hence our use of Spanish, Russian, French, sports, politics, beauty, literally anything - sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes corporate - a depersonalized tone that doesn’t care or cares a little too much, it's uncomfortable. This work-in-progress has been called a poem, a diary, an epistolary novel, a performance in progress, a piece of conceptual writing, and an autobiography.  I am still unsure what it is. Yet, it continues to parasitically grow as I do, invading my routines, seeping into every aspect of my life, quietly eroding my autonomy. This project is about me as pure biographical emotional input, about us actively contributing to our obscolesence by volunteering the affective data language doesn't have access to outside the bounds of the human body.