Nikita Diakur
Ugly Memories
July 29, 2025
SOLOS is pleased to present Ugly Memories, a series of works drawn from the world Nikita Diakur has been building since 2014 in relation to his film Ugly.
Nikita Diakur’s work moves between animation, experimental filmmaking, and digital art, shaped by a creative philosophy that embraces imperfection, randomness, and open-ended world-building. Drawing aesthetic cues from overlooked corners of internet culture, kitschy videos, glitchy interfaces, and lo-fi self-help tutorials, he filters these fragments through simulation to surface unexpected moments of humour, pathos, and critique. His films forgo the pursuit of traditional perfection, instead foregrounding raw, unfiltered moments where vulnerability and authenticity shine through.
At the core of Diakur’s studio practice is a method he calls Ugly Dynamics: 3D characters and environments are rigged like digital puppets and surrendered to physics engines. The resulting glitches, flopping limbs, contorted bodies, erratic collisions, aren’t mistakes to be smoothed out, but vital expressive tools. This approach reframes the animator’s role, introducing a generative, systems-based sensibility: rather than choreographing every movement, Diakur curates conditions for emergence and selects moments of emotional and conceptual resonance. These unpredictable events imbue the work with a kind of awkward humanity that often feels entirely absent from digital media.
Diakur first coined the term Ugly for his 2017 short of the same name, a fractured faux folktale that reimagines a sentimental internet story about an abused cat. The film’s deliberately skewed colour palettes and distorted character models serve the internal logic of what Diakur called the Ugly. By framing this setting as a world in its own right, he positions each following work not as a standalone piece, but as a chapter in a broader, continuously unfolding universe.
While Diakur’s practice is rooted in simulation and system-driven 3D animation, it does not exclude reality. Personal footage, compositional cues, and material such as audio captures drawn from his own environment often enter the work, folded into the digital scaffolding of Ugly. These fragments sit alongside the fallibility and unpredictability of his simulations, reinforcing a digital vision of analogue life that feels unvarnished and instinctively true. This interplay between observation and invention, between external reality and internal logic, is what gives the work its emotional charge, not because it seeks realism, but because it allows space for contradiction, failure, and the unspoken rhythms of the everyday to persist within a digital frame.
Diakur treats the Ugly universe as an open platform, frequently releasing work-in-progress sketches, behind-the-scenes clips, and follow-up shorts that expand its cast of characters, geographies and its strange, physics-driven logic. By leaving the digital scaffolding visible, simulation rigs, interface tools, broken physics, he invites the audience into the machinery of the work’s creation. This transparency reinforces the sense that Ugly is less a product than a process: art as open experiment rather than finished object.
“It is like creating an artificial distance between you and the software. You give up control for randomness, which you can contain only to a certain degree.”
Nikita Diakur
“Ugly” feels alive because it resists finality; its landscapes and inhabitants constantly recombine and fracture and we see an environment whose only stability is found in a state of flux. Through this it’s clear that every shot is a transient glimpse of a larger, unruly system, where no single viewpoint can claim authority. Diakur’s universe gestures toward the uncentered chaos of our lived experience, its digital strangeness is grounded in the same disorder, plurality, and unpredictability that define our world. By rejecting a figurative, traditional approach, Diakur’s work makes the digital feel less like an escape, and more like reflection; messy, vulnerable, and real.
Diakur’s latest series, “Ugly Memories” presented through SOLOS, documents the long-form construction of Ugly, not via a single project, but through a constellation of works developed across the last ten years of his practice. These pieces, though varied in form and focus, are united by the same chaotic internal logic that animates his broader universe: an environment where meaning emerges not from control, but from interruption and unpredictability. Rather than offering a linear progression, the collection unfolds as a fragmented, accumulative mapping of a digital terrain defined by instability, offering glimpses into a world that is at once absurd, fragile, and uniquely human.
Bio
Nikita Diakur, an artist based in Germany, is known for portraying everyday activities using unconventional computer simulation methods that inherently bring randomness and chaos into his work. This approach allows for unexpected and spontaneous results, which are integral to his animation style…