Re-election Day [Water]
6 – 15 May, 2022
Meat Market’s Stables, North Melbourne
Nina Sanadze’s new monumental video and sculptural installation Re-election Day [Water] is epochal. Bringing the feeling of surrender into the realm of visual poetry and splendour, we are invited to contemplate our own fragility and the finality of civilisation. Broadly conceived against the background of environmental, political and demographic crises in the world in the 21st century, it is deliberately presented on the verge of the upcoming Federal election in Australia. The humble cardboard election booth becomes a sculptural form and a symbol of hope, choice and change.
The first work in this series titled Re-election Day [Fire] was exhibited in the aftermath of New Year fires in March 2020.
“Elevating mundane objects like cardboard election booths into potent sculptural forms and then grafting them into contradictory settings, helps me to evoke powerful unconscious associations and to initiate storytelling,” Nina Sanadze explains.
As stark white drowning vessels, the frail cardboard election booths are offset by the dark and dense vessel of the ocean water. This ocean holds floating human bodies which are depicted in the liminal state between rest and tension or, perhaps, life and death. The mesmerising beauty and the spiritual quality of water also holds the ever-present flipside – latent danger and the grotesque power of destruction.
Re-election Day [Water] is part of the group exhibition Vas Holos
Vas Holos
Claire Bridge • Jia Jia Chen • Nina Sanadze • Katie Stackhouse
At the unprecedented time of political, ecological, cultural and existential rupture and void, Vas Holos exhibition connects us with all these concerns while offering the viewer a tender, compassionate, caring and nurturing vessel to contain our thoughts and feeling, allowing us to feel the grandeur of nature, beauty of humanity, rapture and hope.
Claire Bridge, Jia Jia Chen, Nina Sanadze and Katie Stackhouse, explore concepts of wholeness (holos) and the vessel (vas) through rupture and embodiment, translated across sculpture, video and installation. Whether the vessel be of a human/more-than-human body, the earth, body politic or of culture, each contemplates our complex mesh of interrelations as containers of emergent, transformative change.
Vas Holos – Essay by Josephine Mead
“To rupture; to remain whole; to pour; to fill; to rebuild; to retain. One of my initial artistic encounters with the vessel was within the studio. The studio; the primary vessel for making.”
Read Here… Josephine Mead essay Vas Holos 2022 in PDF
Vas Holos_Exhibition Media Release
This project is supported by the City of Melbourne arts grants.
Images: Nina Sanadze, Re-election Day [Water], 2022, video still.
Directed by Nina Sanadze. Cinematography by Simon Green. Sound design by Hassan Larech.
