These postcards have been designed and produces exclusively for the Jewish Museum of Australia, with artwork by Nina Sanadze with photography by Christian Capurro. Sculptures from this body of work is on display at the JMA as part of her exhibition Hana and Child.
About the exhibition
The Jewish Museum of Australia: Gandel Centre of Judaica is proud to present a selection from Nina Sanadze’s immense body of work Hana and Child as an installation throughout our spaces. This series of clay sculptures depicts mothers with their children and is informed by the 1942 ‘Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph’: a black-and-white image of a mother embracing her young child while a uniformed man pointed his gun at them at close range. Of this remarkable body of work, Sanadze says, ‘I wanted to show love and immense tenderness between each mother and child in their last moments, not the violence.’
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. Sanadze draws on the political, the familial – including her own family history in Georgia (former USSR) – and the poetic to examine peace, conflict and humanity.
About the artist
Nina Sanadze was born in Georgia (former USSR) in 1976, immigrated to Russia as a refugee in 1992, and immigrated to Australia in 1996. With Jewish, Georgian, and Russian heritage, her family’s narrative involves ancestors who endured the Holocaust in Ukraine.
She is currently a Gertrude Contemporary resident artist. Sanadze is the winner of the 2023 Deakin Small Sculpture Prize, 2021 Churchie Emerging Art Prize, 2018 Incinerator Art Award: Art for Social Change, 2019 Victorian College of the Arts Bus Projects Award, and 2019 and 2020 Fiona Myer Victorian College of the Arts Award.
Social practice is an important facet of Sanadze’s work, she is a member of Melbourne art collective ShrewD and the founding Artistic Director of Collective Polyphony Festival which was held across multiple gallery spaces in Melbourne in 2023.