© Sasha Opeiko (2026)
Sasha Opeiko
Nutritive Rot Index
Instagram residency
From June 20 to August 20, 2026
@dazibaomtl
Nutritive Rot Index observes how food transitions from nourishment to evidence, and from image to waste. Responding to food’s mediatization on social media and other interfaces, such as nutrition trackers, meals are scanned, logged, cooked, refrigerated, photographed, captioned and forgotten. Never truly stable, nutrition flows through competing regimes of appetite and inventory.
3D scans and modelling are piled onto phone recordings and screenshots, rendering edible matter into a kind of data rot. The image is chewed into a smear of warped meshes, broken surfaces, and uploadable remains. Rot, as an organic force, seeps into its own mediation. Through serial compressions, sharpness liquefies into an accumulation of residue and distortion.
The Instagram feed is used as part inventory, part contamination archive, and part fragmentary essay on freshness, rot, appetite, optimization, and the growing persistence of decay inside the systems built to contain it.
Sasha Opeiko is an artist, writer, and researcher working with video, installation, new media, painting, drawing, and assemblage. Her practice explores melancholy, decay, and the translation of images and discarded objects amid conditions of consumption, obsolescence, and technological mediation. Using found materials, digital processes, and fragments of visual culture, her work investigates states of loss, transformation, and disintegration.
She has exhibited at Art Windsor-Essex, Thames Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Peterborough, and McIntosh Gallery (Ontario), among others. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She completed her PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University in 2024.
Dazibao thanks the artist for her generous collaboration as well as its advisory committee for their support.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the Ville de Montréal.
Dazibao acknowledges that it is located on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation and that Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and today, is home to a diverse population of Indigenous as well as other peoples. Guided by ethics of respect, listening, and awareness, Dazibao commits to a continued reflection regarding the deep-rooted and systemic challenges tied to accessibility and inclusivity in the arts and beyond, and endeavors to apply such reflections to all aspects of its activities and governance.