artist bios

nicole salnikov

Nicole Salnikov is a visual artist and designer. Questioning the human condition and how we live, she is particularly interested in concepts of time, nature, and nonverbal communication. Through research and a multidisciplinary approach, her practice explores visual, tactile, and temporal aspects of human experience.

She primarily works with paper – books, printed matter, mixed media drawing, analog photography and darkroom printing, and silkscreen printing. By exploring the dialogue between these visual means, Nicole seeks to blur the boundary between art and design. Her work often initiates more questions and curiosity than offers answers, and this continuous questioning is what fuels her practice.

Coming from a background in architecture, Nicole worked with architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in Philadelphia (2015), with poet and architect Kreider + O’Leary in London (2016), as well as with architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson in Philadelphia (2017-2020). She has been an artist-in-residence at Can Serrat in Spain (2018) and ÖRES in Finland (2022).These experiences continue to influence her practice today.

Nicole studied architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia and Rome (2010-2014) and joined Umbau Studio in Vienna (2015) and Krakow (2016, 2017, 2019). She completed her masters in visual communication and iconic research at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW Basel (2020-2022). Originally from the United States, she currently runs her own practice in book design and visual art in Basel.

https://nicolesalnikov.com/

nicolas coia

Born 1984 in Princeton, NJ, USA, Nicolas Coia is a fine art analog photographer and UX design strategist. His work focuses on the juxtaposition of subconscious alignments between images within a given series; leveraging shapes, textures, and the overt and covert emotions within a photograph to curate his stories. He hopes to emote intimate and soft portraits of his life and to open space for others to explore the intimacy within their own lives.

Practicing slow photography, his work is fully analog and shot with 120mm film on various black and white film stocks. All displayed images are made by hand in Basel at the Dunkelkammer Gundeli.

He is currently the Head of Group UX at Endress+Hauser and is a member of the Dunkelkammer Gundeli Collective since 2022. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration from Northeastern University in Boston, MA USA and a Masters in Industrial Design from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA USA.

https://nicolascoia.com/