At the center of Melanie Alieva’s artistic practice are painting and film. Her work explores how interpersonal experiences of fear are negotiated within the tension between trust, illusion, and social narratives. She examines how memories become distorted, suppressed, romanticized, or rewritten, and how these processes intersect with forms of trust that are often dismissed as naïve.
The artist reinterprets feminist, gothic, mythological, internet-based, and popular cultural narratives, placing them in dialogue with one another. These references range from gothic fairy-tale adaptations such as The Company of Wolves (Carter, 1979; Jordan, 1984) to contemporary online discourses such as the Man or Bear debate and motifs like the Red Room. These influences intertwine with personal and collective experiences of nostalgia, emotional abuse, desire, violence, deception, and fear.
A central point of reference in her work is Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, which describes states in which the boundaries between self and other, safety and threat, and memory and imagination begin to dissolve. Many of her works revolve around the simultaneous impulse to reject danger while also holding onto or nurturing it. Within this framework, Melanie Alieva investigates fear as an ambivalent experience that oscillates between fascination and the romanticization of potential danger. Her work moves between trust in intuition and learned narratives, manifesting in impulses to flee, return, hide, dream, remember, forget, long for, or regret.
Her paintings and video works frequently feature young women and animals situated within ambiguous landscapes that hover between protection and threat, curiosity and naivety, past and present, memory and imagination. The works combine atmospheres of uncanniness, tenderness, “naïve” care, vulnerability, and trust. Many revolve around the simultaneous impulse to resist a potential danger while also nurturing it. They reflect an internal conflict between memory, intuition, and learned narratives.
Her artistic process often begins with her own photographs, video works, or short films, from which she develops film stills as the basis for paintings. Moving images are central to her visual language, as is the aesthetic of the Poor Image (Steyerl, 2009). She is particularly interested in fragmented perspectives, tilted horizons, stretched pictorial spaces, and split screens as formal devices that evoke uncertainty and instability.
