Monumental Shift

Victorian College of the Arts
A studio archive of a prominent soviet sculptor Valentin Topuridze (1907-1980), plaster models, moulds and fragments, 4m2, 2019.
Photos by Christo Croker.

Written by Christine Fontana

Within days of their arrival in Australia, the fragmented pieces of sculpture models and plaster casts that make up the surviving archive of Soviet propaganda artist Valentin Topuridze were assembled by artist Nina Sanadze, into an installation called Monumental Shift. Referring to their recent movement from Georgia to Australia, the title describes both the Soviet decline that led to their fall from grandeur into cultural irrelevance, and their geographical displacement. To Nina these combine to signify layered forms of violence.

Disembodied and decontextualised, they stand incongruously within the installation like foreigners fresh off the boat, their predominantly human features making them easily anthropomorphised and highlighting the raw fact of their displacement. Following a trajectory similar to Sanadze herself, in this way they form a close parallel to her experience first as a Georgian refugee and then as a migrant to Australia.

As the rubble of iconoclasm, the archive’s decay and fragility takes on powerful symbolism and emphasises the softening of violent histories over time. Poignantly, the pieces have an inherent beauty that gives them an emotional quality, increased by the relationship that links Sanadze to Topuridze himself via three generations of family association. As neighbours, the pieces have personal significance due to her childhood memories of playing amongst parts of giant sculptures and works in progress in Topuridze’s garden and studio.

The contrast between Sanadze as an artist working within an individualist society and Topuridze, whose artistic inclinations were stifled by working within the Soviet propaganda environment, invites consideration of ideas about freedom and enables her to honour the grandfather of her childhood friend as an artist capable of this degree of beauty. The ‘dismembered’ body parts reveal the process of having been lovingly sculpted, their decay ironically elevating the pieces to a state of attractiveness they might not have achieved when they were whole and functional political symbols.

As an acquisition the archive has given Sanadze autobiographical material imbued with both personal and political memory, and this installation on Australian soil – an unlikely destination for such an archive – is the first of many incarnations within which the rich layers of story embodied by the archive will be applied to Australia’s own history of monumental art, violence, and selective representation.

Monumental Shift is featured in Art + Australia, Event Horizon Issue, 2020