Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian (born 1968) is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator. She works with photography, sculpture, video, and sound—often in playful ways. She is best known for her "Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style," a series of self-portraits taken in airplane bathrooms.[1]

Nina Katchadourian
Born1968 (age 54–55)
Stanford, California
NationalityAmerican
Websitehttp://www.ninakatchadourian.com/
"Monument to the Unelected", installed in storefront Washington Post 15th street, N.W. Washington, D.C.

Her projects have been exhibited widely, including a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in July 2008, the Turku Art Museum in Finland in January 2006, the ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art.[2] A major mid-career survey exhibition of her art accompanied by an exhibition catalog[3] was organized by the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin in 2017 and traveled to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2017–2018.[4]

Biography

Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California in 1968.[5] Her father, Herant Katchadourian, a Turkey-born and Beirut-raised Armenian, was a psychiatrist, a former Dean at Stanford University, and a Professor Emeritus of Human Biology.[6][7] Her mother, Stina Katchadourian, is Swedish-speaking Finn, and was a literary translator, writer and Esperanto expert.[6][7] She grew up spending summers on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year.[8] Katchadourian attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California.[7][9][10]

She received a B.A. degree from Brown University in 1989,[11] and an M.F.A. degree from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1993.[12] She attended the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1996.[13]

She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is on the faculty at New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study.[14] Katchadourian is married to Sina Najafi, founding editor-in-chief of Cabinet Magazine.[15]

Work

Nina Katchadourian has worked in many media, including sculpture, photography, video, and sound. The underlying concept is often marked by an intrinsic sense of humor, characterized by an intelligent, ironic and systemic reordering of natural processes. Her work is simple yet effective.[16]

Orderings

Many of Katchadourian's pieces involve bringing an incisive and playful order to the world. The "Sorted Books"[17] series, for instance, ranges from ephemeral and impromptu arrangements of volumes on the shelves of friends, to commissioned photographed orderings of books in museum and library collections. The body of work is available as a book[18] published by Chronicle Books.

Mended Spider Webs

Her "mended spider webs" series involves making careful but obvious "repairs" to the rips that occur in natural spiderwebs.[19] Using tweezers and glue she continued the pattern of the spider webs with starched bright red twine. The tools used to repair these spider webs can also be found in her "Do-it Yourself Spiderweb Repair Kit" piece, also part of the "Mended Spider Webs" series. While working on the series, Katchadourian became interested in how nature feels about humans attempt to 'help'. The next morning she found that the spiders did not appreciate her help. When she went out to the first spiderweb repair the following morning she found the red twine unraveled and lying on the ground below. The spiders had rejected her help and undone all of her work throughout the night. Katchadourian was able to capture the rejection process on tape in a 10 min video titles "GIFT/GIFT".[20]

Maps and charts

In some cases, Katchadourian makes this obsession with order explicit, by working with maps and charts. Her "Family Tree" series creates faux genealogies for such objects as rocks and airplanes. Other pieces are literally made of the fragments of maps. Her "Coastal Merger" shows a map of the United States made of only the Eastern and Western seaboards; "Map Dissection I" cuts out only the streets from a standard-issue road atlas, and mounts them as a kind of arterial web on glass.

Performances

Katchadourian has brought her fascination with systems to public spaces as well. In CARPARK, a 1994 work at Southwestern College, she sorted by color vast numbers of cars in more than a dozen parking lots.[21] In 2006, in a project sponsored by the Public Art Fund, Katchadourian installed a telescope on a Manhattan street corner, focused on a 17th-floor office of a nearby building. During the course of the project, the lawyer who inhabited the office would arrange objects on his window sill to send coded messages to the observer.[22]

Seat Assignment

Through the use of humor, Katchadourian is able to create art using materials that are on hand at any given time. This series which she calls "seat assignments" includes work such as,[23] "birdsong substituted for car alarms... a popcorn machine's clatter interpreted as Morse code... the piling of pretzel crumbs atop a magazine photograph of a bridge to suggest a landslide, for example, or the configuring of the folds of a black sweater to resemble the face of a gorilla".[23] These works while as a concept are about connecting two things ranging from, "seamless to awkwardly disjunctive"[23] are not simple ideas that fall flat, in that they exploit the brains desires to form meaning.[23] Her "Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style" are part of this series.[15]

Museum interventions
Crumpled microfiber dust wipe printed with an image of dust in a museum space and bearing the logo for the MoMA Artists Experiment program. An associated art label reads: "Also part of the Artists Experiment program, Katchadourian investigates the theme of dust, exemplified by this cloth printed with an image from the MoMA galleries."
A promotional dust wipe produced during Dust Gathering's planning, as displayed in the 2015 exhibition Messing with MoMA

In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art invited Katchadourian to produce a work under its Artists Experiment program, in which contemporary artists create or perform pieces reflecting upon or utilizing museum resources.[24] Having noticed the immense quantity of dust which collected in various locations around the museum's architecture and on artworks within its collection, Katchadourian produced a series of audio segments[25] for the museum's existing audio guide program which toured visitors through a series of stops where dust commonly collected, and featured interviews with various MoMA staff on their methodologies and experiences dealing with dust in the museum. The audio tour became available in October 2016, and was scheduled to run through April 2017.[26]

Exhibitions

Solo shows

Group shows
  • 2013: Balls to the Wall, DODGE Gallery, New York City[34]

References
  1. Laura van Straaten (October 24, 2016). "How to Clean a Dusty Picasso at MoMA: Use Your Spit". The New York Times. Retrieved March 18, 2018.
  2. "Nina Katchadourian | Exploratorium". Exploratorium. December 9, 2015. Retrieved March 25, 2017.
  3. Nina Katchadourian : curiouser. Roberts, Veronica,, Kastner, Jeffrey,, Horodner, Stuart,, Basha, Regine,, Blanton Museum of Art. Austin, Texas. March 2017. ISBN 9781477311516. OCLC 951742561.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  4. "Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser". caareviews.org. Retrieved March 24, 2018.
  5. Desmarais, Charles (September 22, 2017). "Nina Katchadourian comes home to Stanford with home run show". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved March 6, 2019.
  6. "Odyssey from Iskenderun to Beirut to America: An Extraordinary Memoir in "The Way It Turned Out"". www.electrummagazine.com. June 5, 2014. Retrieved October 26, 2019.
  7. Klein, Julia (March 2009). "A Closer Look". Brown Alumni Magazine. Retrieved March 6, 2019.
  8. "Nina Katchadourian | Island Press". islandpress.samfoxschool.wustl.edu. Retrieved March 28, 2019.
  9. Shah, Chiara Biondi, Amanda Hmelar and Hazel. "An Artist at Play". C Magazine. Retrieved March 6, 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  10. Ollman, Leah (May 22, 2008). "A little bit baffled". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved March 6, 2019.
  11. "A Closer Look". brownalumnimagazine.com. Retrieved March 28, 2019.
  12. "Solo Exhibition by Celebrated Artist Nina Katchadourian | Cantor Arts Center Press Releases". museum.stanford.edu. Retrieved March 28, 2019.
  13. "Nina Katchadourian Biography – Nina Katchadourian on artnet". artnet.com. Retrieved March 28, 2019.
  14. "NYU | Gallatin Nina Katchadourian". New York University. March 25, 2017. Archived from the original on March 27, 2017. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  15. Straaten, Laura van (February 22, 2019). "The Artist Behind the Famous Airplane Bathroom Selfies". The Cut. Retrieved May 31, 2023.
  16. "Nina Katchadourian". Art+Culture Projects. September 4, 2015. Retrieved March 28, 2019.
  17. "Nina Katchadourian". ninakatchadourian.com. Retrieved March 28, 2017.
  18. "Sorted Books". Chronicle Books. Retrieved March 28, 2017.
  19. Nina Katchadourian
  20. Moody, Tom (1999). "Nina Katchadourian: DEBS & CO" (PDF). Artforum. xxxvii (10) – via ninakatchadourian.com/press.php.
  21. Found In Translation ArtReview, April 2008, p. 68.
  22. Watch That Space: The Oracle of the 17th Floor The New York Times, Randy Kennedy, November 21, 2006.
  23. Turvey, Lisa (Summer 2012). "Nina katchadourian". Artforum International. 50: 323–324 – via ProQuest.
  24. "MoMA | Artists as Houseguests: Artists Experiment at MoMA". www.moma.org. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
  25. "Dust Gathering: An Audio+ Experience by Nina Katchadourian | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved March 28, 2017.
  26. "Dust Gathering: An Audio+ Experience by Nina Katchadourian | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
  27. Richard, Frances; Katchadourian, Nina; Berry, Ian; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, eds. (2006). Nina Katchadourian - All forms of attraction: June 24 - December 30, 2006. Opener. Saratoga Springs: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. ISBN 978-0-9765723-1-2.
  28. Villarreal, Ignacio. "Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego". artdaily.com. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
  29. Steinhauer, Jillian (April 20, 2017). "Nina Katchadourian's Playful, Persistent Questioning". Hyperallergic. Retrieved January 10, 2022.
  30. "Nina Katchadourian | "The Recarcassing Ceremony" | Catharine Clark Gallery | Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
  31. "Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser | Cantor Arts Center Exhibitions". museum.stanford.edu. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
  32. "Nina Katchadourian". The New Yorker. Retrieved March 27, 2019.
  33. "Uncommon Denominator: Nina Katchadourian at the Morgan". The Morgan Library and Museum. July 22, 2022. Retrieved May 22, 2023.
  34. "DODGE gallery". dodge-gallery.com. Retrieved March 3, 2018.
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