Nikolay Smirnov is a geographer, curator, and researcher, working with geographical imaginations and the representations of space and place in art, architecture, science, and everyday life. His practice focuses on analyzing and implementing complex narratives through texts and exhibitions. Smirnov studied at the Geography Department of Moscow State University and the Rodchenko Art School (Moscow). Co-curator of the projects Metageography (2014–2018), Arctic Biennale Permafrost (Yakutsk, 2016), Nikolay Smirnov participated in the main projects of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial (2019, curator Xiaoyu Weng) and the 2nd Riga Biennial (2020, curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel). In 2025, Smirnov co-curates the performative workshop Liberating Esoterics? Anti-authoritarian Re-appropriation of Esotericism by Art (Casco, Utrecht, 2025), prepared on the base of his 4-years curatorial research Eurasian Alchemy. His interest in esoteric knowledges comes from the geographic studies of spatial meaning and geo-imaginations. Smirnov’s research texts are published in many collections, such as Enfleshed: Ecologies of Entities and Beings, and on the platforms e-flux, syg.ma, New Age in Eurasia and others. In 2023–24, he was a research assistant at the documenta Institut (Kassel, Germany). Since 2024, he has been a research associate at Kassel University and in the interdisciplinary Research Training Group Organizing Architectures.
