Nina Sanadze - essay by Amelia Wallin

Nina Sanadze, Hana and Child
catalogue essay by Amelia Wallin

“Photographs echo photographs” claimed writer, philosopher and activist Susan Sontag in her treatise on violence and photography. Sontag is referring to the ways in which photographs of atrocities can live on in our minds and in collective memory. According to Sontag, when encountering images of war, torture or violence, one can’t help but recall earlier photographs, stitching together an agonising visual history of suffering. I feel this acutely, photos live on in my mind which I cannot unsee. One such is image is of Alan Kurdi, who drowned while seeking asylum in Greece. I saw this photo in the media, on the homepages of online newspapers, in the tender months after first becoming a mother. On my phone I saw his smallness, the bulk of his waterlogged nappy, while my own tiny son slept on me and it was too much to bear.

Echoes of photographs haunt Nina Sanadze too. Her current exhibition at Daine Singer began with a singular photograph, a grainy black and white image of a scene that we were never meant to witness. A woman holds a child, fabric billows around them, and a Nazi solider points a gun at her back. This photograph was taken 1942 in Ivanhorod, Ukraine, a town less than 50 km from where Nina’s Jewish ancestors resided. Nina’s maternal great-grandmother, Hana, along with three of her children, Misha (aged 14), Efim (aged 12), and Rachael (age eight), were killed by Nazis during this period. In the absence of any images of Hana, Misha, Efim or Rachael, this could be them.

After encountering this image, and facing her own familial lineage, Nina began to collect other photographs of Jewish women and children held at gunpoint. The subjects of these photographs — mothers and grandmothers, children, and babies — have been transformed by Nina into clay sculptures. Always in pairs, the sculptures depict figures intertwined, in acts of embrace and protection. At first Nina studied the positions and postures of the subjects, their hands and gestures, in order to transform them into clay. But after a while she couldn’t look at them any longer.

I let the clay and memories and my hands to intuitively guide me through.
Then it felt like sculptures made themselves

Here, sculptures echo photographs. You stand before 314 of them, each between 20 and 45 centimetres tall. The 314 sculptures represent a fraction (0.02%) of the one and a half million Jews murdered between 1941 and 1942 in Ukraine and other former USSR republics. These atrocities happened in the same regions where Nina’s own Jewish ancestors resided. They are made from fired unglazed stoneware, hand-built by Nina, with help from her mother. Sculpted over the summer holidays, at the kitchen table, in between meals and the caring of children. Without glazing, the fingerprints of both mother and daughter are preserved, and the sculptures take on a quality that feels immediate and urgent. Although their scale may be domestic, their volume is not. The figures quickly took over Nina’s house and studio. I imagine them filling the available surfaces, amongst the detritus of everyday life. They are faceless, like many of the Holocaust victims who remain unknown. For Nina these figures morph, taking on different forms.

My great-grandmother repeated 300 times, or it is 300 different mothers with children, a crowd gathered for the execution, or their ghosts.


90 minutes North-West, another version of ‘Hana and Child’ stands in Bendigo/Djaara, in the outdoor courtyard of La Trobe Art Institute. This is a singular sculpture, a life-size depiction of the same woman and child from the photograph. One of her feet is lifted off the ground, the child is wrapped in a blanket — tiny feet protruding, the women’s cheek pressed against the child’s head. My own son is a similar size to the young child Nina sculpts. The dimpled hands are so familiar I hardly dare look at them. These equivalences are too hard to process, I shut them off as abruptly as shutting a door. One day in the gallery I hear a viewer remark, without having read the wall text or the exhibition guide, “this is a feminist work. She is fleeing persecution”. The arms clutching the child, the determination, the bravery. It’s all revealed in the body.

Unlike the 300 smaller iterations, this sculpture has not been fired, and Nina’s choice to exhibit it outside further accelerates its material degradation. The erosion happens slowly and then all at once. It strikes me that this is how the rise of fascism is described, slowly and then all at once. The day the child's hand falls off I weep. It has been raining heavily for days and the raindrops streak through the clay like tears, leaving tracks on the side of Hana’s face.

Back in Melbourne/Narrm, the details and specifics of these bodies, their dimples and tear streaked cheeks, give way to impressions and gestural shapes moulded from clay, astounding in their multiplicity. They are placed simply on the concrete floor, with a gap down the centre through which the audience walks through. For Nina, this represents the ravines that collected bodies of the murdered Ukrainian Jews in what has been called a “Holocaust by bullets”. Unlike the material deterioration of the lifesize Hana, Nina intends for these smaller sculptures to endure. She hopes that after the exhibition, they might find new homes. Nina describes each one as “a love letter”. Their gradual dispersal into the lives and homes of others suggests a collective accountability and a sharing of responsibility.

Why make something that is so hard to face? Why write about something so unfathomable? Sontag states, “as objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.” For Nina, its not about numbness or memorialising, it is important that we face the brutality of our past, so we don’t repeat these same atrocities.

I sculpt their tender love, the care of a mother and child, their beauty, humanity and the attempt to protect each other, I imagine them comforting each other in those awful last minutes, an acute feeling of love, care and concern

— Amelia Wallin, 2023