Nisrine Boukhari is an artist and artistic researcher based in Vienna. Her practice centres on mind-wandering, attention, and the nonlinear movement of thought. Working across conceptual writing, sound, film, performance, and installation, she treats language, breath, and duration as materials through which cognitive processes become spatial, embodied, and sensorial. Her work examines how attention drifts between perception, memory, and imagination, and how exile and lived experience shape these movements without resolving into linear narrative.
Since 2012, Boukhari has developed Wanderism is a State of Mind, an ongoing artistic research framework that approaches mind-wandering as both a cognitive condition and a creative, resistant mode of thought. Moving between philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and artistic experimentation, her work produces fragmented narratives and perceptual environments in which drifting is understood not as a failure of attention, but as another way of thinking and knowing.
Extending from Wanderism, Boukhari has developed an evolving lexicon of concepts and methodologies, including Paraconnectivity and Linguanarchia, alongside methods of Respiratory Art such as Psyche-Drawing. Together, they explore how apparently unrelated elements enter into latent relation, and how language, breath, and bodily rhythm can operate as forms of thought and inscription.
Boukhari holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University, an MA in Social Design, and a PhD in Artistic Research from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
She has participated in international residencies including IASPIS, Delfina Foundation, Art Omi, NKDale, and UmArts. In 2019, she was named Artist of the Year by the Swedish Art Association, and her work is held in international institutional and private collections.
Boukhari is also the co-founder of AllArtNow, Damascus's first independent contemporary art organisation, in 2005; Living Spaces, an international festival for contemporary art in Damascus; and Studio1, the Informal School for Contemporary Art, in 2011/2012.