Nina Sanadze
POLYPHONY
8 July - 14 August 2021
Polyphony is a new audio-visual installation that looks to the collective nature of a choir, an orchestra and a forest, seeking to tune into the sound of present-day society. Divided, perplexed and uncertain voices search for harmony and incidental beauty.
The drawings of Polyphony are based on historic photographs from Georgia (former USSR) picturing the artist’s orchestra conductor father and her choir conductor mother. For Sanadze, the choir and orchestra are a reminder, a quixotic inspiration and a metaphor for the potential of magical beauty and harmony that people can create together.
The three large drawings are created from an excess of dot-to-dot markings that simultaneously hide and reveal the images on which they are based. Sanadze’s painstaking drawing process evokes the opposing experiences of mindfulness and angst, with the calculated promise to connect the dots and unveil the complete image. The numbers present disarray and disorder; excessive and overwhelming as they soar into the thousands.
Sections of the drawings are connected with lovingly stitched threads, though they still appear both schematic and impenetrable. Fluctuating between abstraction and representation, the images are also reminiscent of geographical maps or astrological charts.
The accompanying soundscape is Sanadze’s own experimental ‘orchestration’, a contemporary score that references Georgia’s history of polyphonic choral music. Collaborating with her mother to conduct a disparate and untrained group of artists to harmonise following a set of instructions, the resulting vocals bestow the two-dimensional drawings with a transcendent aural dimension.
Blending histories, geographies, time and space, Polyphony seeks to access and arithmetically decode something beyond its constructed images — an elusive, coveted meaning that we can only see in the unconscious mind’s eye.
Nina Sanadze is a Melbourne-based artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts. Sanadze was born in Georgia (former USSR) in 1976 and immigrated to Australia in 1996.
Engaging an encompassing range of mediums and grounded in personal experience, Nina Sanadze’s work dynamically connects immediate critical socio-economic and political developments with pertinent major historic events.
Sanadze has held solo exhibitions at Bus Projects, Second Space Projects, Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West, and City of Port Phillip public art installation series. In 2018 she was invited to exhibit at the 100 Years After, 30 Years On, 3rd Tbilisi Triennial in Georgia.
Sanadze has participated in group exhibitions including at ACE Open, Adelaide; Blindside, Melbourne; Incinerator Art Gallery, Melbourne; Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne; Yering Station Sculpture Exhibition & Awards, Melbourne; Montsalvat Gallery, Melbourne.
Sanadze was the winner of the 2019 Bus Projects Award, Victorian College of the Arts Graduate Show, and the 2018 Incinerator Art Award: Art for Social Change.
Sound engineer by Pete Palankay @The Recording Space
