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Nina Katchadourian: Origin Stories

Date

June 21, 2025 – October 26, 2025

Admission

This exhibition is included in a paid General Admission ticket, except on Free First Thursdays. On the first Thursday of every month, General Admission is free and tickets to this exhibition may be purchased for $5 at the door.

Many of the works in the exhibition were made on the island of Bodö in the southern Finnish archipelago, where Katchadourian’s family have spent their summers ever since she was a child, as did the two previous generations of her maternal family.

The exhibition is installed throughout the National Nordic Museum. Two multimedia works are located within the Museum’s Barbro Osher Gallery. In the immersive installation To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World (2022), Katchadourian works with her intimate knowledge of the 1973 bestselling book, Survive the Savage Sea, which chronicles the true story of a family set adrift for 38 days in the Pacific Ocean after their sailboat was attacked by orca. Written by the father of the Robertson family, Survive the Savage Sea has preoccupied the artist since she first encountered it at age seven. In 2020, Katchadourian contacted the author’s eldest child, Douglas Robertson, and initiated a 38-day, daily conversation corresponding to the Robertsons’ time as castaways. Through audio excerpts, drawings, sculptures, and replicas of objects from the disaster, the gallery becomes a vessel for the story of the shipwreck and the intimate conversation between Robertson and Katchadourian. To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World is paired with The Recarcassing Ceremony (2016), a 24-minute film about an invented game the artist played with her brother Kai during their childhood summers in Finland, her mother’s country of birth. In this game, centered on two families of PLAYMOBIL figures, two key characters were lost at sea and Nina and her brother had to invent a ritual to bring them back to life. The Recarcassing Ceremony sheds light on how serious subjects are so often embedded in the seemingly lighthearted games of children.

Two works in Origin Stories focus on creative projects made by her Finlandswedish maternal grandparents during their summers in the Finnish archipelago. The photographic series The Nightgown Pictures (1997 – 2003) responds to her grandmother Nunni’s tradition of photographing Nina’s mother Stina on her birthday. Each year, Nunni took a picture of Stina in a small handmade nightgown, ending the year when she could no longer fit into it. Beginning in 1997, Nina and Stina revisited the locations depicted in the photographs and documented them again. The work becomes a catalyst for revisiting formative moments and locations in Stina’s childhood and sharing these encounters. Talla (2025), a bronze sculpture, will debut in the Museum’s East Garden. The sculpture is an exact scale replica of a cow constructed of found wooden sticks, made for Stina by her father Lale when she was about 12 years old. The original Talla, still existent but now very fragile, has been cared for by three generations of family and appears in many photo albums like a family pet. Casting Talla in bronze creates a lasting monument to Lale’s tender gift and to the importance of preserving artifacts such as these.

One of Katchadourian’s best-known works, Accent Elimination (2005), will be exhibited in the museum’s library, a space reserved for research on genealogy and cultural identity. Accent Elimination was displayed at the 2015 Venice Biennial as part of the Armenian Pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Via the subject of her parents’ complex accents—often the subject of curious questions from strangers—the six-channel video work speaks to the intricacies of assimilation, cultural identity, and diasporic heritage.

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Nina Katchadourian is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Her video Accent Elimination was included at the 2015 Venice Biennale in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. 

In 2016 Katchadourian created Dust Gathering, an audio tour on the subject of dust, for MoMA's "Artists Experiment" program. 

Major solo museum shows include at the All Forms of Attraction at the Tang Museum in 2006; Works Made in Finland by Nina Katchadourian at Turku Art Museum in 2008; the retrospective Curiouser, which opened in March 2017 at the Blanton Museum of Art and subsequently traveled, and Uncommon Denominator at The Morgan Library & Museum in 2023. Her work has been included in group shows at Serpentine Gallery, Turner Contemporary, de Appel, Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Grey Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1.

Katchadourian has received grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Grönqvistska Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. 

Katchadourian's work is in public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library & Museum, Margulies Collection, Saatchi Gallery and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Katchadourian is Clinical Professor on the faculty of the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery and lives between Berlin and Brooklyn.

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