HANA & CHILD by Nina Sanadze

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.