Ina Darakchieva

Consumed

2025

Ina’s work explores the interplay between internal conflict, identity, and societal structures through disjointed, glitch-inspired aesthetics. Working across painting, photography, and moving images, they examine the fragile boundaries between digital and physical, control and collapse, mind and environment. At the heart of Ina’s practice lies the concept of the glitch—understood not only as a digital error, but as a metaphor for imperfection, psychological rupture, and non-normative identity. For their graduation project Consumed, Ina created a stop-motion/live-action short film that takes the form of a psychological thriller. The film portrays an artist caught in a loop of daily routines and rising anxiety, ultimately consumed by their own work—both literally and metaphorically. Developed from a personal experience with burnout, the project explores the mental toll of artistic labor and the isolating pressures of productivity. Recurring motifs—a burning candle, matches, and a spider—symbolize exhaustion, entrapment, and the fine line between creation and self-destruction. The film moves between dreamlike states and waking confusion, using visual metaphor and repetition to mimic the fractured perception of burnout. Consumed employs a hybrid visual language: charcoal sketches animated frame by frame, paintings, time-lapse sequences, and live-action footage mimicking stop-motion through stuttering movement. Ina is particularly interested in how these different modes—live action, sketch, painting—interact and what they reveal when layered together. This disjointed aesthetic reflects the fragmented experience of burnout, where time distorts, perception falters, and the line between self and work begins to blur. Paintings shown within the film are also exhibited separately, further blurring the line between documentation and artwork, fiction and reality. Ina’s use of glitch aesthetics and layered media creates an environment where chaos, ambiguity, and discomfort become tools for reflection. The imagery is intentionally unclear and open to interpretation, mirroring the multiplicity and dissociation that often accompany mental health struggles. Through this work, Ina frames burnout as a systemic glitch—an interruption in the relentless push to produce, succeed, and perform within a capitalist framework. By confronting viewers with haunting visuals and emotionally charged narratives, Ina invites them to reflect on their own relationship with labor, identity, and the body. Consumed challenges the expectation that artists—and people—should function flawlessly, revealing the beauty, vulnerability, and complexity that exist in moments of breakdown.

Artist statement
Ina Darakchieva is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Netherlands. Ina’s work explores the blurred lines between the digital and physical, control and chaos, reality and the mind. Using the digital glitch as both metaphor and medium, they embrace imperfection and abnormalities in our external surroundings to explore identity, inner conflict, and the hidden sides of the self through paintings, film and photographs. Inspired by horror and psychological thrillers, Ina examines the multilayered nature of humanity, bringing out the most hidden and often misunderstood corners of the subconscious and creating haunting narratives, confronting the viewers with their own internal conflicts.

This page was last updated on July 8, 2025