Hana & Child
8 JULY – 5 AUGUST 2023
Daine Singer gallery
83 Weston St, Brunswick

Catalogue essay by Amelia Wallin HERE.

About a year ago, Nina Sanadze inadvertently came across a black-and-white image of a mother embracing her young child while a uniformed man pointed his gun at them at close range: the ‘Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph’. Upon further investigation Sanadze realised that this photograph was taken in 1942 in Ivanhorod, Ukraine, a town less than 50 km from where her maternal great-grandmother, Hana, along with three of her children, Misha (aged 14), Efim (aged 12), and Rachael (aged eight), were murdered by Nazis in the same manner. In the absence of any photos of them, this image could be Hana.

In conjunction with witnessing the footage of Ukrainian families under siege in the Russia-Ukraine war, for Sanadze, the sight of this haunting historic photograph transformed the unspoken familial history into something tangible and demanding immediate attention. Since then, Sanadze has devoted herself to crafting an immense installation composed of more than 300 unique ceramic sculptures depicting mothers with their children. Hoping to convey the magnitude of this historical event and breathe life into it by making it visceral and visual, just as the photograph had done for her.

Known for large-scale installations using replicas and original artefacts, Sanadze’s work has been described as “conceptual art dressed in a classical form”. On this occasion, Sanadze creates an emotive interpretation of a single black-and-white photograph, while also referencing and subverting iconography of the Madonna and child.

Sanadze uses an impressionistic style of sculpting clay, creating these figures from memory, and focusing on the transmission of emotion rather than representational form, to create raw and crudely-hewn depictions of mothers with children.

“I created these sculptures in my home studio, in an intimate family space. My mother, Mila, who lives nearby, offered to help to cope with the sheer volume of work. We ended up sitting in the studio side by side, every day, surrounded by hundreds of sculptures of mothers and children. I was sculpting the figures and my mother hollowing them to prepare for firing. A symbolic action of making and unmaking in an effort to recreate an image of a grandmother she never met. Each sculpture a love letter.”
– Nina Sanadze

“I wanted to show love and immense tenderness between each mother and child in their last moments, not the violence.”
– Nina Sanadze

Go to Daine Singer gallery to find out more and purchase work HERE.

Photography by Christian Capurro.