Nina Sanadze
What was your first experience of art and/or an artwork and how did this affect you?
I was lucky to be surrounded by art and music from birth.
I remember visiting the amazing studio of my great uncle Korneli Sanadze, who was a renown painter in Georgia. The smell of the oil paint and hundreds of huge and spectacular paintings filled the place. It was magical. My dad also used to draw with ink and pastels en plein air a lot during our holidays. I loved to sit with him and try to draw too.
I also spent a lot of time at my friend and neighbour’s house who was a grand daughter of a famous Soviet monumental sculptor Valentin Topuridze. Playing amongst his sculptures in the studio and garden is a vivid memory that influenced me in a significant way.
Later on, as a teenager, I ended up living in St Petersburg. For the first time there I visited great galleries. I remember a rather emotional experience at the Hermitage museum where I was taken by one large painting of Pierre-Auguste Renoir called In the Garden. I stood in front of it for quite a while, feeling immersed, as if it almost came alive. I still remember it vividly.
What or whom would you say have been the most powerful influences upon your work?
Being surrounded by music and art in my childhood was perhaps the most powerful influence. Since living in Australia, in inner Melbourne, I became inspired by a local artist Julie Shiels who ended up mentoring me couple of years ago. She helped with my practice when I was just starting to get into it after having two children. Julie also influenced me artistically, so I am forever grateful to her.
At the moment I am inspired by artists like Doris Celcedo, Mona Hatoum, Michael Rakowitz, Francis Alis, Charlotte Posenenske, Gilles Clement, Forensic Architecture, Danh Vo and Herman de Vries to name just a few.
What would you say is the purpose of an artist making artwork?
“Changing the world one poem at the time” is how I see the purpose of my art.
I like to think of my artworks as poems.
While poems have a limited political agency, they sometimes have a power to generate a deep emotional response which can stay with you for a long time. This is what I am looking for in my art.
Your practice commenced from two-dimensional works and has moved to three dimensions– why did this occur and what has been the most surprising thing you have learnt or noticed from this shift?
I started as children’s book designer and illustrator some 20 years ago. I also used to work as a stage and costume designer for fringe theatre for a few years. Even though books are considered to be a two-dimensional space I always thought of the space on the page as a three-dimensional space, treating it like a theatre space.
Homecoming 2 (2020) photographer Nina Sanadze
Similarly, in fine art I started as a portrait artist and a painter and it took me a little while to move into sculpture, installation and performance. With that shift I’ve understood that a painting is more commonly like a window into an autonomous world. To the contrary, a sculpture, as a three-dimensional object exists within the world – interacting, responding and transforming the place and itself. This potential is most exciting for me and I have been experimenting with these possibilities.
Re-Election Day! (2020) Two Channel Video, cardboard, charcoal. Photo by Lucy Foster.
So, for example, the same set of sculptures I used for the installation Bollard City at the Living Museum of the West became an entirely different work The Divide at the Incinerator Gallery. It happens organically with all my sculptures. Every time I re-exhibit my sculptures new work is made. That’s because of the way they start to interact with each different installation site. So, in a way my sculptures become a modular basis for a variety of contextualised installations and meanings.
Your images of eroded 3-dimensional depictions of body parts combine a formal form of politicised statue making placed in a variety of provisional domestic settings. What do you consider to be the intersection between the personal and the political?
For me, political and personal has always been intertwined.
Homecoming 3 2020 photographer Nina Sanadze
Since childhood, I saw first-hand how political events had a direct effect on my life. This dynamic is particularly strongly apparent in this new photographic series of work.
Created under the quarantine conditions, home becomes the site, the main character in this work, equally so with vegetables, eggs, fruit, my political sculptures and the family members – all trapped in time, matched in significance, filled with memories, psychological tensions and symbolic meanings.
Do you consider the showing of art to be an event or something that comes after an event?
I’d say that about 25% of my artwork is made during the process of exhibition installation. Definitely even more so with performances.
This is when everything comes together and I often make big decisions and changes based on how the work engages with space. Also, the full understanding of work I make often crystallises for me after the exhibition. So it’s a very important process in my practice.
In re-presenting parts of works that are created by another (historic) artist you start to question authorship. Who would you say owns history? What does it say about the role of the artist – both the original artist and the artist who represents the original work as a fragment in a new – unexpected- context?
I’ve thought a lot about a problem of quoting and appropriating works of Valentin Topuridze, and I have also agonised about bringing his archive from where it belongs, from Georgia, all the way to Australia.
It seemed like a violent action and a difficult decision but I am glad I did it.
Different types of appropriation have occurred since the beginning of 20th century. In this work, appropriated sculptures quote and refer to another century, another political system, another country, another culture, another life, another aesthetic.
Transplanting them through time and space and re-contextualising them sheds a new light on history and on the work of Valentin Topuridze, otherwise condemned and forgotten. It brings forth important questions about appropriation, about our work as artists in any political context, about our ethical choices, about what history leaves behind, hides, erases or reveals.
It brings up these questions and provokes this thinking that is so fundamental to my work.
Cover Image Homecoming 1; 2020. Photographer Nina Sanadze.
