URGENCY: A lot? Not enough! Nina Sanadze Supervisor: Claire Lambe Honours Paper October 2020 Victorian College of the Arts University of Melbourne

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Setting the Scene 3

MOVING TO FILM: Being Part of the Radical Times for the Medium 6

SCREENPLAY: Some Words Articulated by People in Response to my Mute Films 8

POEM FILM REVIEWS: Situating my Films 10

SENSORY COMMUNICATION: The Unspeakable 11

THE TOPURIDZE ARCHIVE: What are Those Sculptures? 13

CONUNDRUM: The Symbiosis of Beauty and the Terror 19

STRANGE OCCURANCE: Foreboding the End 20

CONCLUSION: The Tip of the Iceberg 22

Bibliography 23

Appendix 26

Please note, a list of figures is not provided is this paper. Complete captions are stated under the images.

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The images on pages 1-3 are film stills from Nina Sanadze, Terminus (35 mins), 2020.

INTRODUCTION: Setting the Scene It’s been an intense and difficult half-year of Honours in the pandemic age, and it would be impossible to contextualise the unexpected trajectory of my practice without reflecting on the social conditions of Coved-19. In this short space of time my art practice has undergone a metamorphosis from sculptural form, installation and performance to documentary and experimental film. Emblematic of the times, the lack of access to sculpting facilities, resources and materials has fortuitously diverted me into a new medium. Armed with my lo-fi iphone 11 camera, I intuitively resorted to the simplest and the most accessible form of documenting and articulating the process of looking, perceiving and thinking.

Relying on natural or house lighting, people and objects around me, I have produced the films Terminus (35 minutes) and Embedded (11.37 minutes) in my home. Yet, against the limitations of the lock down,1 I have also reached out and captured my peers in their homes and workplaces, resulting in a series called Living Room, currently consisting of 10 short films.2 Covid-19

1 I was acting lawfully within the allowed lockdown restrictions when filming in June-July of 2020. 2 I consider Terminus to be my major experimental feature film, while Embedded is a shorter experimental film and the Living Room series are shorter again, like sketches. These are experimental in style and documentary in nature.

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disruptions provided an opportunity to expand and look at new spaces created through the enforced isolation of Melbourne residents. Peeking into the unique, rich, creative private spaces of my peers, as well as sharing my own, highlighted a compassionate facet of the pandemic experience.3 The absolute shift of our existence to domestic spaces as well a switch to virtual communication during the six months of lockdown is documented in these works and reflected through the medium of film. 4 The pioneering creator of the photo-sharing platform Flickr, George Oates, said that technology has created a “shift from the private to the public and from personal to the communal.”5 Daily, we have looked into the homes of public figures on mainstream media, as well as teachers and peers during our classes and work through platforms like zoom.6 Documenting this phenomenon in an art form, my films serve as both a mirror and a lens into our lives and times. An extensive body of work created in the last four years provides a valuable perspective to consider the general trajectory of and methods used within my art practice. 7 Utilising humour and beauty of the visual form, the work conversely reveals dysfunctional political structures and a history of violence.8 It responds to the socio-political milieu of the time through personal narrative. British art theorist Irit Rogoff identifies this more personalised creative process as ‘criticality’.9 She explains that criticality entails an increasing emphasis on working from conditions specific to our lives. In other words, responding to socio-political concerns from the perspective of personal experience.10 Respectively, since 2017 my work has responded to events associated with vehicle-ramming terrorist attacks, the legacy of public monuments, the federal elections of 2019 and the New Year fires of 2020. Through these works I have revealed how these events impacted me personally and how they transformed society, by exploring both personal and collective memory. My mediums variously included sculptural form, installation, performance, street art, video and public art, necessitated by the broadness of themes. The material used ranged from large concrete rendered installations, to ephemeral gestures, to welded metal moveable sculptures, to cardboard and site-specific videos, to installations with appropriated art, all in a bid to reflect and speak to the time. This year, my Honours work explored the following critical themes prevalent in our lives. I have created portraits of artists and their experience in an era of pandemic, through a domestic lens that reveals the home as the depository of our existence and creativity. These portraits are

3 The films endeavour to show both the talent of each featured artist, and the way they support their practise. Many projects celebrating people in the community have developed during the challenging times of Covid-19, according to the Directors of Global kindness Initiative, “Compassion in the Time of Coronavirus,” The University of Edinburgh, published April 30, 2020, https://www.ed.ac.uk/covid-19-response/expert-insights/compassion-in-the-time-of-coronavirus 4 The use of social media and online news outlets rose by 50-100%. Ella Koeze and Nathaniel Popper, “The Virus Changed the Way We Internet,” The New York Times, April 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/07/technology/coronavirus-internet-use.html ; Similarly, many artists, musicians, performers, theatre companies and galleries shifted their creative output to online platforms. Steven Melendez, “For Artists the Show Must Go On – and Zoom is Their Venue,” Fast Company, published March 23, 2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90478442/for-artists-the-show-must-go-on-and-zoom-is-their-venue ; According to the director of WHO, this has “Misinformation Sharing and Social Media Fatigue During COVID-19: An Affordance and Cognitive Load Perspective,” Elsevier Public Health Emergency Collection, published July 12, 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7354273/ 5 Manca Juvan, Power in Whose Palm? The Digital Democratization of Photography Session Report (Salzburg: Salzburg Global Seminar, 2013), 18. https://issuu.com/salzburgglobal/docs/sgs_report_502 6 Jake Wakefield, “Coronavirus: Zoom in Everyone’s Living Room,” BBC News, March 27, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52033217 7 Most of it as an undergraduate and Honours student at VCA. 8 The equal failure of both socialist and capitalist systems is analysed in the book by Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 9 Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality,” Goldsmiths University of London, published 2006, https://gold.rl.talis.com/items/48A2BAC5-8C5B-0602-2E97-863D663C78C6.html 10 To distinguish, Irit Rogoff says that previously artists worked from the position of critique and criticism, in other words responding to socio-political matters from the outside. Irit Rogoff, “Criticism to Critique to Criticality,” Transversal Texts, published January, 2003, https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en

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coupled with an examination of the socio-economic conditions of artists’ lives in a neoliberal society. I have also explored the legacy of public monuments based on the remnants of those that have been torn down previously. This work has coincided with the dismantling of many public monuments across the world by the Black Lives Matter movement.11 And finally, through my films I’ve communicated a sense of the melancholy and grief associated with uncertainty and the process of transitioning into radically new times, farewelling the familiar past. Here, I am projecting a personal as well as collective precognition that humanity is on the cusp of a great new and unknowable era, based on a combination of factual and intuitive notions. Namely, the current incongruity and precariousness of the socio-economic situation in the world due to Covid-19,12 coupled with forecasting by an evolutionary historian like Yuval Harari concerned with the proliferation of AI,13 the bleak environmental and climatic conditions of our planet,14 and even the pseudoscientific astrological outlook.15 Conveying the unspeakable nature of confusion, uncertainty and lament associated with this transition I instinctively turned to non-verbal, sensory language in my work. The need to address this time in an appropriate format during lockdown has underpinned the shift of my medium to film. Expressed through the dichotomy of aesthetic splendour and poeticism, together with implied terror and dread, the films recollect the past, echoing the history of our divine yet flawed nature and bidding it farewell. This paper presents the following chapters: - Moving to Film, being part of a radical period for this medium looks at film as a medium of our

time and why I made the switch. - Screenplay, some words articulated by people in response to my mute films will present some

of the feedback received from teachers and peers in the form of quotes. Impressionistically filling in the gaps and speaking in script-like sentences, this chapter will give a collective voice to the mute films.

- Poem Film Review, situating my films will define the characteristics of this genre, situating and contextualising my work within the relevant oeuvre.

- Sensory Communication, the unspeakable will examine the non-verbal language adopted throughout the presented body of work, analysing how it functions and aims to affect the viewer.

- The Topuridze Archive, what are those sculptures? will reveal the personal story behind the sculptures in the films.

- Conundrum, the symbiosis of beauty and terror will grasp this baffling dichotomy at the core of my work.

- Strange Occurrences, foreboding the end will consider qualities of allegory and absurdity, drawing parallels with the genres of Flemish still-life, tableau vivant, symbolism and

11 Johnny Diaz, Christine Hauser, Jason M. Bailey, Mark Landler, Erin McCann, Monika Pronczuk, Neil Vigdor and Mihir Zaveri, “How Statues are Falling Around the World,” New York Times, June 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html 12 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Robert J. Shiller, Gita Gopinath, Carmen M. Reinhart, Adam Posen, Eswar Prasad, Adam Tooze, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Kishore Mahbubani, “How the Economy will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Foreign Policy, April 15, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/how-the-economy-will-look-after-the-coronavirus-pandemic/ 13 Harari predicts a mass human obsolescence due to AI rather than a mass extinction. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (UK: Penguin Random House, 2017). 14 Some scientists are declaring that through humanity’s impact on the planet we have entered the Anthropocene epoch, effectively ending the epoch of Holocene. Damian Carrington, “The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced Age,” The Guardian, August 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth ; “The Effects of Climate Change,” NASA, sourced September 25, 2020, https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/ 15 A consensus, conveyed by astrologists, that the past 2000 years was a Piscean era and now we are entering the age of Aquarius, which will be radically different to the previous era. Ray Grasse, Signs of the Time: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of World Events (Newburyport: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2002).

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surrealism in the film Terminus. It will also touch on the temporality experienced through the tension of stillness and movement experienced in all of the presented films.

I’ve never heard anybody speak so fast, and there is so much work here, it’s like you are in your own group show, and you finish sentences with ellipses, so they never end…, have been some of the poignant remarks from teachers responding to my films. For the entire past three years I’ve been driven by a burning sense of urgency to create, this frenzied activity resulting in an abundant body of work. This year, acting manifestly against the paralysis of Melbourne’s lock down, I have made seemingly too many films for teachers, peers and examiners to watch within the expected format and time limitations, yet conversely, it’s not nearly enough. Documenting, examining and grappling with some of the critical events of our time, the sense of urgency to respond, capture, document and create has been instinctive and overwhelming. Cairo-based artist and film-maker Edit Molnar says that a sense of urgency and emotional intensity is produced through engagement with one’s social, political, cultural and economic conditions, and the production of form, the material of an artist’s labour. He explains that urgency relates to time elements, as the creation of many works in a short period is not predetermined, it is discovered, come upon.16 I would expand further that urgency is related to the political and aesthetic agency of art and the relevance of contributing in the given time.17

MOVING TO FILM: Being Part of a Radical Period for this Medium Photography has become a democratic and participatory medium for artistic expression since the revolutionising proliferation of digital technology and platforms like Instagram. Citizens have become activists and photojournalists,18 decentralising mainstream media, bringing important stories from personal perspectives and enabling widespread reporting and almost constant coverage.19 Requiring a large crew, professional equipment and expertise, film has remained a relatively elite medium up until now. However, the time for its decentralisation has possibly just arrived.20 I’ve been astonished by the remarkable versatility, freedom and scope of TikTok videos created daily by my 10-year-old daughter and her peers.21 Simultaneously, throughout the making of my films, I never failed to be impressed by the incredible quality of image that my

16 Edit Molnar in conversation with Hassan Khan, “A Constant State of Urgency, Visual Arts and Art Practices in the Middle East,” The Arab Studies Journal 18, no. 1 (2010): 232-252. https://shibbolethsp.jstor.org/start?entityID=https%3A%2F%2Fidp.unimelb.edu.au%2Fopenathens&dest=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27934083&site=jstor 17 Similar ideas are considered by David Rothkoff, “The Urgency of Art is a Dangerous Rapidly Changing World,” Foreign Policy, April 10, 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/10/the-urgency-of-art-in-a-dangerous-rapidly-changing-world-united-arab-emirates-culture-summit/ 18 Some famous and important examples of citizen journalism are related to the Arab Spring in 2010, the Syrian Civil War since 2011, the Haiti earthquake in 2010, the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, the Euromaidan demonstrations in the Ukraine in 2013, and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. 19 Adam Portell, the director of the journalists’ union, reported that the COVID accelerated closure of most local media outlets has resulted in the community relying on social media to cover this year’s local council elections in Victoria. From a self-funded independent City of Port Phillip digital weekly newsletter G’day Twisk 234, September 21, 2020, https://gdaystkilda.com.au/2020/09/ Melissa Spinner, The Effects of Social Media on Democratization, Master’s Thesis for the City College of New York, published 2011, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=cc_etds_theses 20 Chris Smith, “The Future of Video: Democratisation of Creativity and Production,” The Guardian, February 24, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2012/feb/23/democratisation-creativity-production 21 For the first time a genre of ‘cinematic TikTok’ has emerged, hailing the rise of a new generation of teenage film-makers while Hollywood is at a standstill during the pandemic. Source: “Brad Esposito, Teens Are Basically Making Cinematic Indie Movies On TikTok Now,” Pedestrian TV, published August 30, 2020, https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/teens-are-basically-making-cinematic-indie-movies-on-tiktok-now/ Jourdan Aldredge, “Filmmakers of Tomorrow on TikTok Today,” Premium Best at Shutterstock, published July 9, 2020, https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/teens-are-basically-making-cinematic-indie-movies-on-tiktok-now/

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basic iPhone 11 was able to produce. I realised that only a couple of years ago one would have needed an elaborate professional camera to deliver such quality of cinematography. Yet here I was, with no experience, a keen eye, an idea and a phone, bringing film after film into being in quick secession. You are baking them like pies, joked a film director friend of mine. Certainly, platforms like TikTok and Instagram are the true bulk video and photo bakeries of this time, while I am harnessing the possibilities of new technology to produce quality, low-fi, zero budget films with ease. In fact, in the last few years, the performance and accessibility of the mobile device has made it the camera of choice for some professional directors of feature films.22 Along with the sharp quality and rich colour of the produced image, mobile phone footage is also characterised by shakiness, blurry or inconsistent image, and distorted audio quality. Creating a sense of intimacy, these qualities have been targeted and made emblematic by the ground-breaking Dogme 95 filmmaking movement since 1995.23 Their principles foresaw many of the key features of the mobile phone aesthetic, such as shooting on location using a hand-held camera and natural lighting. Slippages or imperfections render these fiction films as real, genuine and honest, replicating the authenticity of the documentary film. The camera motion also denotes body movement, revealing the constant presence of the director, the person behind the camera. Evidently, I have been a long-time admirer of Dogme 95 films. For me, the discovery of the medium of film-making brought with it a sense of great joy, liberation and playfulness, something that I have longed for in the process of art making. Previously, most of my artistic expressions have typically manifested through the laborious, heavy and costly methods of painting, casting, rendering or welding. The produced artworks were expensive, bulky and not always environmentally sustainable, requiring storage or permeating my home space (as evidenced in my films). The medium of film has allowed me to effortlessly register the central and the most fundamental creative process in visual art – the act of looking. Looking became my tool and everyone and everything around me, a potential material. The camera lens magically transforms the ordinary moment into something monumental and timeless.24 Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky called this ephemeral process ‘sculpting in time’.25 French philosopher Roland Barthes described a photograph as a site of collective memory, a role previously performed by monuments in public spaces.26 Capturing and memorialising moments in time produces a monument of a new kind, a film. In that sense, the evolution of my practice from sculptural form to film seems consistent and natural. Looking through a camera produces visual thinking. For art psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, looking is equated to thinking.27 However, what we see, think and how we interpret is subjective to each individual viewer. Art critic John Berger suggests that, in that sense, looking is a political act and exists in a variety of contexts.28 The visual thinking expressed in my films can therefore be interpreted and distorted in a myriad of ways according to the eye of the audience. (Below are some of the interpretations from viewers.)

22 One well-known film shot exclusively on mobile phone and screened at Sundance Film Festival is Tangerine (2017), by director Sean Baker. Sarah Atkinson, “How the smartphone is changing cinema,” The Conversation, January 27, 2016, https://theconversation.com/how-your-smartphone-is-changing-cinema-53525 23 http://www.dogme95.dk 24 Ladina Bezzola Lambert and Andrea Ochsner, eds., Moment to Monument, The Making and Unmaking of Cultural Significance (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 25 As suggested in the title of the book by Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections of Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). 26 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill, 1981). 27 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (London: University of California Press, 1969). 28 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).

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SCREENPLAY: Some Words Articulated by People in Response to my Mute Films CF: “Three parts, like a sonata form.” RP: “Three music pieces. Introduction, development and conclusion.” NC: “Garden to house to garden, a circle.” AB: “Camera never stops moving, film encourages deep engagement.” SB: “Hand held device is humorous and poetic.” CC: “Hand held raptures are stiflingly beautiful.” CL: “Slowly revealing the scene. Artist behind the camera is setting the parameter, holding a

certain distance, close details, slow release without letting us understand the big picture.” SM: “Scale is ambiguous.” SB: “Moving through the still image, documentary makers use this technique to bring the event

forward.” SL: “Actors are not moving but the camera is moving, as if time has stopped. Like in that film

with the boy moving through the mass suicide. It’s a witness view.” SN: “Domestic into cinematographic space.” AW: “Domestic enigmatic space reconfigured taking a viewer on a journey.” MS: “Strategy to explore home.” RP: “Domestic to fantastic.” FV: “Domestic apocalypse.” SS: “Displacement, discomfort, we are displaced here in this home.” RP: “Trivial beginning, strange ending.” NP: “The movie is a multitude of still-lives.” CL: “Memento Mori, death and life, a very short period in life.” AD: “An evocative series of moments. What came to mind was a phrase coined by Giorgio de

Chirico's wife, Isabella Far; instead of a 'Still Life' she preferred to call it a 'Silent Life'. Both the camera and music infuse the visual with life, albeit a 'Silent Life’.”

SS: “Objects seem embedded.” TK: “Poetry – need to escape logical. Helps to express feelings in a condensed way. Poetic to

portray the repulsive, the terrible and the beauty.” SN: “Makes you think of time.” LR: “The constant interplay of stillness between the sculptures and the family members ...

almost as still as the sculptures ...” FV: “Human to non-human.” CC: “What stillness does to a person. It turns subject into an object.” CL: “Moment with people in it created an arrest… because everything seems frozen… it shifted

the temporal space… something in the work is so held, breathless, unnerving, paralysis, discomfort, small death, discomfort.”

CF: “Video is the keeper of souls, feelings don’t go away, don’t die. Video records our souls, our lives.”

LP: “Static people are holding space as two-dimensional.” CF: “An abstracted family portrait. Sense of control and resistance.” TB: “Ghost aspect, something haunting you.”

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AD: “From the personal and particular to the universal.” CF: “Micro and macro – trans-subjectivity.” SB: “Recasting emotional, recasting public monuments, experiential subjectivity.” AD: “We forget, at times, how formative the childhood years are.” MS: “The monuments are your childhood ‘teddy bears’.” AD: “A document of the state of stasis we are in, during this the year in lockdown. “ AD: “The current lockdown has enabled you to encapsulate and reflect on these personal

histories. Reframing them through your own family in its current domestic sphere. The sculptures interspersed with the domestic environments lend a particular elegiac resonance.”

TK: “Metaphor beyond rational.” AD: “Both humour and sadness oscillate throughout, a topography of searching for meaning, a

yearning, fecundity at times of both presence and absence.” CF: “Soviet monuments teach us of impermanence, just like Covid-19. We are not in control.” AW: “Beautiful forms in another space, they change everything, don’t have to understand

that.” NC: “Re-contextualizing sculptures and monuments.” SN: “Statues and fruit act like props.” AD: “Sculptures, vegetables and people are assigned the same value.” TK: “Curating sculpture in the movie, how they are seen. Representation is displaced. Western

traditional symbols are dislocated. Trying to find where they should go, where they are.” KK: “There are two narratives going on here… historical and personal. Meat scene is where for

the first-time history of death and war becomes apparent.” MS: “Nazi and Soviets loved classical beauty and healthy bodies.” LR: “The voice in German, ’This is normal’, alludes to a psychological space. Psychiatrist’s

chair.” SS: “Difference between when things are staged and not staged.” SL: “The scene with balloons and sky is not staged… hard to know what is going on.” CC: “Moments that work are when it slips into surreal, where control is lost momentarily.” CC: “Treading on the edges, revealing something we can’t put our finger on.

Parapsychological.” SM: “Naturally occurring or staged paranormal.”

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POEM FILM REVIEWS: Situating my Films In the Crosswind (2014),29 by the Estonian director Martti Helde, employs a cinematographically tableau vivant style analogous to my films .30 However, it is a narrative film where the protagonist recounts a chronicle through reading personal letters. The tableau vivant mechanism turns In the Crosswind into a series of black and white photographs, which serve as forensic and factual evidence reconstructing the events of a violent past. The effect of looking at the photos recreates the intimacy of recounting a familial story through a private album, while also revealing the greater story of 10,000 Estonians (mostly women, children and elderly) who were forcefully deported to Siberian labour camps by Stalin in 1941. The constant movement of the camera through the stillness of the photographic tableaus creates a tense and uncomfortable dynamism. It contains an intensity of emotion, capturing and eternally arresting the painful and pivotal moment of the farewell kiss of the loved one. Suspending the medium of film into a series of stills effectively turns it into a painting exhibition, a visual poem. The sudden wind gust setting the hair in motion betrays the photographic effect, momentarily activating the halted clock and breathing life into the frozen characters, rendering the scene real. Russian director Alexander Sokurov, on the other hand, presents a continues 96-minute single-take film called Russian Ark (2002).31 Set in the Hermitage Museum (formerly the Royal Winter Palace) in St Petersburg, Russia, the film endeavours to capture the grandeur of Russia and its cultural heritage. Despite the constant motion of the camera and the dancing characters, the film produces an overall effect of a still tableau image. The impression of the simultaneous witnessing of a brief event creates the phenomenon of concurrent time, merging the continuous moving image into one huge panoramic painting. Writer Viktor Shklovsky divided cinematographic genres into the two categories of Prose and Poem Films,32 defining Prose Films as based on a storyline, with plot and action, the characteristics of semantics. According to Shklovsky, Poem Films neglect these features. He states that “Plotless film is poetic film”.33 Poem Films rely instead on ‘geometric devices’ such as composition, form and colour, as well as poetic techniques such as refrain, rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, imagery, romanticism, allegory, metaphor and personification. Film critic Jeanne Vronskaya described Poem Films as a ‘cinema of images’.34 Pioneering this form by adopting a poetic non-narrative structure, Georgian/Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates also employs the tableau vivant style.35 Like In the Crosswind, The Colour of Pomegranates’ visual qualities resemble paintings, based on traditional theatre or pantomime set designs reminiscent of his childhood experience. Capturing the material beauty of cultural artefacts and traditions on the cusp of a more technological age, Parajanov utilises an alternative, augmented and allegorical modality, compressing the world to create saturated expressiveness. Poeticism of the image is key in delivering metaphor here. By removing the linear

29 In the Crosswind, directed by Martti Helde (2014; Eastonia: Allfilm, 2014). 30 Tableau Vivant in French means ‘living picture’ and is a creative genre that represents a stylized mixture of painting and theatre aesthetics popular from the 1830s till the 1920s. “Tableau Vivant: History and Practice,” Art Museum Teaching, published 2012, https://artmuseumteaching.com/2012/12/06/tableaux-vivant-history-and-practice/ 31 Russian Arc, directed by Alexander Sokurov (2002; Russia: Seville Pictures, 2002). 32 F. W. Galan, “The Meaning of Film Style: The Russian Formalists' Semiotic Approach,” Yearbook of the Semiotic Society of

America (1983), 613-622, https://doi.org/10.5840/cpsem198329 33 Stephen Bann, John E. Bowl and Viktor Shklovsky, eds., Poetry and Prose in Cinematography (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973). 34 James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/detail.action?docID=3445360. 35 The Colour of Pomegranates, directed by Sergei Parajanov (1969; Soviet Union: Cosmos Film, 1969).

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plot and offering only image and sound, The Colour of Pomegranates invites the viewer to fill in the gaps, involving them in the creative process. Tacita Dean resorts to allegory to create a documentary, observational and poetic film in Michael Hamburger (2007). Here, an old and magnificent apple garden with its harvest of rare fruit creates a metaphorical and rich portrait of the protagonist, an elderly poet. While the film contains an informative narrative where Hamburger talks about the apple breeds, his storytelling creates a meta-narrative, designed to lead us to metaphorical thinking. Poignantly paralleling the poet’s life with the garden, Dean depicts the cycle of life.

SENSORY COMMUNICATION: The Unspeakable Words fail me in the midst of this Covid-19 crisis. Rendered speechless, losing the capacity for verbal utterance, unable to think clearly, I retreat within, into the emotional and intuitive space of expression. Speechless and in search of language, my films bypass the verbal to create a different kind of narrative, describing the unspeakable, expressing the indefinable.36 Terminus could easily borrow the manifesto stated in the opening titles of the iconic Soviet film Man with a Movie Camera, by Dziga Vetrov:

An experimentation in cinematic communication without the use of intertitles; without the help of a story; without the help of theatre; the film aims to create an international experience based on its absolute separation from language, theatre and literature.

In other words, transcending familiar verbal dialogue, which strongly appeals to our intellectual and rational cognition, my films are designed to operate through visual communication and acoustic narrative. According to the neuroscientist Robert Sylvester, we foremost trust our sensory input of sight and hearing as highly accurate tools and as our primary filters to gather immediate information about the world.37 The introduction of language enriches and complicates our perception, yet, often lost in translation, manipulated, misinterpreted and subverted, the meaning of linguistic messages can be misleading and unconsciously distrusted. Grounded in the easily recognisable banality of a domestic setting, Terminus employs this persuasive sensory method of communication to tell the story of something intangible, absurd, metaphysical, grotesque, fantastical and allegorical. As if pulling the rug out from under our feet and destabilising the familiar and the fundamental, through our sensory perception this method calls into question what we empirically comprehend and know. Simultaneously, the sensory language employed in the film tries to convince the viewer of the truthfulness of what lies beyond the expected, knowable and cognisable, as if legitimising the surreal. In this world of peculiar synchronicity, the cabbage naturally belongs on the bedside table, potatoes make sense on the book shelves and concrete bollards are expected to be on the bed. Eerie and dissonant to

36 Dori Laub, “From Speechlessness to Narrative: The Cases of Holocaust Historians and of Psychiatrically Hospitalized Survivors,” Literature and Medicine 24, no. 2 (2005), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7320620_From_Speechlessness_to_Narrative_The_Cases_of_Holocaust_Historians_and_of_Psychiatrically_Hospitalized_Survivors 37 Robert Sylvester, A Celebration of Neurons: An Educator’s Guide to the Human Brain (Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1995).

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the affluent settings of the comfortable family home, the displaced objects are convincingly embedded in their seemingly alien settings. The sensory messages of sound and image are designed to simultaneously disrupt and enhance the film’s attempt at conveying meaning. We hear and see the piano, but the pianist has no hands. We see the ping-pong table and hear the sound of the game, yet plaster statues don’t participate in the game. It is almost as if the familiar technique of many thriller films, where tension and suspension is created through sound in an otherwise benign setting, is subverted in Terminus, and we see the opposite of what we have anticipated. Visual and sound aesthetics weave their parallel narratives, often jarring and sometimes harmonising, to create a symbiosis of meaning and narrative. According to developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, there are multiple distinguished intelligences that process information, most of which are not acknowledged by IQ testing, which recognises only linguistic, spatial and logical abilities.38 Intelligences such as musical and visual, among others, process information in parallel, weaving in and out and eventually synthesising everything into a cohesive meaning via a system of symbols. Stripping back to non-verbal communication encourages us to sharpen our senses. Attempting to induce the viewer into a meditative and immersive state of heightened awareness, Terminus seeks to access the emotional space of personal associations, nostalgia and memory. Sylvester suggests that evolutionarily we are designed to first react and then to analyse in order to survive in nature.39 This is also why when bypassing the logical, our senses directly connect to emotions (most commonly fear and anxiety responses). Non-verbal, sensory experience is immersive and has a greater ability to captivate our attention and stay with us longer. Evoking empathy and emotion, tapping into our subconscious, it also appeals to a place of deep memory, according to neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux.40 It does so by connecting a foreign experience with a personal memory and turning this event into an intimate, meaningful and memorable knowledge. As Carl Jung states:

I feel that from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis. Musical interaction reaches deep archetypal material that we can only sometimes reach in our analytical work with patients.41

During this time of world crisis, while exposed to a digital overload of verbal and visual information, making each film but particularly through the making of Terminus, I sought to create a visual poetry that transcends verbal language. Guiding audiences through a multidimensional sensory experience at a contemplative pace, the films are designed to encourage reflection on a mnemonic, emotional level, enabling a soothing, authentic and meaningful way of internally processing a moment in time that is characterised by a culmination of chaotic external events.

38 Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 39 Robert Sylvester, A Celebration of Neurons: An Educator’s Guide to the Human Brain (Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1995). 40 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Touchstone, 1996). 41 From an interview with Margaret Tilly. Source: William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull, eds., C. G. Jung Speaking, Interviews and Encounters (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), 275.

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THE TOPURIDZE ARCHIVE: What Are Those Sculptures? Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, I travelled back to Georgia, the county of my birth, to stage an installation in the 2018 Tbilisi Triennial.42 I had a plan to rescue and exhibit the surviving studio archive of much forgotten and condemned prominent Soviet monumental sculptor Valentin Topuridze (1907-1980). Looking to re-examine my roots, I wanted to unearth the forsaken archive and reactivate it both physically and culturally. Famous for Lenin’s monument in the centre of Tbilisi (figure 1), as well as for sculptures at the front of the Georgian parliament building (figures 2 and 3), Topuridze also created many monuments of writers, soviet figures, Stalin and Lenin, that were situated across cities in the Soviet Union (figures 4 and 5). As a close family friend and neighbour, I grew up amongst Topuridze’s models and monumental works in progress, in the studio and garden of the artist. Climbing giant fragments of Lenin’s and Stalin’s heads, noses and hands (figure 6), the unusual, surreal and enchanted playground-like setting, and the consequent violent fall of his monuments, left an indelible impression on me. There is still a mixture of shame, confusion, aversion and travesty associated with Soviet propaganda art for many Soviet-born people, including myself. Even Valentin Topuridze’s family, in a double erasure, destroyed all the remnants of his Stalin and Lenin sculptures and studies, leaving only about a hundred of his other decomposing plaster models and molds in the garden shed of a family friend (figures 7 and 8). Encountering the sculptures after such a long time I uncovered something altogether surprising. No longer grand and victorious, they appeared poignantly small and fragile (figure 9). I remember being struck by their obsolete and frail beauty, combined with the sadness of the violent history they represent and embody (figures 10 and 11). Working with the installation I cried there every day. Having since acquired and transported the archive from Georgia to Australia, through various installation incarnations I have used it to develop a material language that describes temporal and political memory. Now, in isolation with my family during the times of pandemic, I find myself again surrounded by the artefacts of Topuridze’s practise in a domestic setting, on the other side of the world. It is a chilling evocation of that childhood (figure 12), the fall of the Soviet regime and the refugee experience that followed.

Figure 1. Valentin Topuridze, Lenin Monument, Tbilisi, Georgia, 1950s.

42 Nina Sanadze, 100 Years After, 30 Years On, exhibited in the 3rd Tbilisi Triennial, Georgia, 2018. (Figure 9)

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Figure 2. Valentin Topuridze, Workers and Farmers Monument, Parliament Building, Tbilisi, Georgia, 1970s.

Figure 3. The torn down monument by Valentin Topuridze, Workers and Farmers, Parliament Building, Tbilisi, Georgia 1990. Photographer Giorgi Tsagareli.

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Figure 4. Valentin Topuridze in his home studio sculpting Stalin, Tbilisi, Georgia, between 1950-1960. Courtesy of Topuridze’s family.

Figure 5. Valentin Topuridze in his home studio sculpting Lenin, Tbilisi, Georgia, between 1950-1960. Courtesy of Topuridze’s family.

Figure 6. Valentin Topuridze’s family home/garden/studio, Tbilisi, Georgia, 1980s. Courtesy of Topuridze’s family.

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Figure 7. The only accidentally-surviving model of Stalin by Valentin Topuridze, 2020.

Figure 8. Valentin Topuridze’s studio archive in storage at a friend’s home, photographed when I came to collect it, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2018.

Figure 9. Nina Sanadze, 100 Years After, 30 Years On, 3rd Tbilisi Triennial, Georgia, 2018. A studio archive of the prominent Soviet sculptor Valentin Topuridze (1907-1980); plaster models, molds, fragments and traces, plaster, acrylic paint, 6m2. Photographer Sandro Sulaberidze.

Figure 10. Nina Sanadze, 100 Years After, 30 Years On (detail), 3rd Tbilisi Triennial, Georgia, 2018. A studio archive of the prominent Soviet sculptor Valentin Topuridze (1907-1980); plaster models, molds, fragments and traces, plaster, acrylic paint, 6m2. Photographer Sandro Sulaberidze.

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Figure 11. Nina Sanadze, 100 Years After, 30 Years On (detail), 3rd Tbilisi Triennial, Georgia, 2018. A studio archive of a prominent soviet sculptor Valentin Topuridze (1907-1980); plaster models, molds, fragments and traces, plaster, acrylic paint, 6m2. Photographer Sandro Sulaberidze.

Figure 12. Baron Peter Clodt, Russian Emperor Alexander II (fragment of the public monument), approx. 1855-1867. Photograph of the bedroom at Valentin Topuridze’s descendants’ home where it was kept, Tbilisi, Georgia, 2018.

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CONUNDRUM: The Symbiosis of Beauty and Terror Thirty-five years after the bombing of Hiroshima, lots of little Soviet children, including myself were still making a thousand paper cranes (figure 13) and sending them to Japan as a symbol of peace, friendship and support. Based on a real story, these represented a wish for seriously ill people suffering from the consequences of the explosion. The incongruous synergy of a delicate origami shape and a cruel explosion created a grotesque fusion of beauty and horror, making them inseparable in my mind. Similarly, Yhonnie Scarce’s installation Thunder Raining Poison, 2015 (figure 14), presents us with the ephemeral beauty of 2000 glass yams suspended from the ceiling and symbolizing victims of genocide, each yam representing an Indigenous person killed as a result of the Australian government’s nuclear testing in Maralinga between 1954 and 1963. Michelangelo’s lifelike marble Pieta (figure 15) offers a mastery of composition, exquisite form and material representing a pinnacle of beauty, fluency and harmony in art. The beauty of the sculptural form is breathtaking and so is the tragedy and sorrow it depicts. The young mother is holding her grown, dead son. They don’t look like Gods; it is a monumentalized human tragedy. Medieval manuscripts similarly bring us shocking images of brutal suffering, torture and death in the most delightful way, decorated with gold. Heightening unease, such works of art yield a multitude of questions. Haunted by this dilemma, I have been trying to reconcile why we need beauty to present something horrific, and ask why does this incongruity persist in art?43 I found the most compelling and unexpected answer in Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Through daily observations of nature, Dillard brings to light the binary quality of existence – its intricate beauty and horrible fecundity.

The entire scheme of creation is apparently based on death, blind instinct, and parasitic nibbling.44

Nature’s startling ability to create life as well as violently destroy it seems to be at the core of creation. Divine and almighty, these attributes have inspired religions as well as poets throughout centuries.45 Like opposing sides of the same coin, nature shows us that beauty and horror are inseparable and intrinsic to our existence, and therefore all expression. In art, the conflation of the macro-historic narrative or divine subject matter with the micro-subjectivity of an individual human suffering creates an emotional resonance. It is through this personal, intimate scale that we can grasp the divine and the global dimension. It is by looking through beauty into horror that we can gain insight into the complete paradigm. Figure 13. A thousand Paper Cranes, Japan, 2013. An image from a blog,

https://thejapans.org/about/

43 Artists adopt a variety of different strategies to depict stories of horror. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s works, for example, take on a literal, graphic and direct approach of showing blood and gore. While Hieronymus Bosch shows explicit horror through aestheticized beauty. Norman Rosenthal, Michael Archer, Michael Bracewell, James Hall and Nathan Kernan, Apocalypse, Beauty

and Horror in Contemporary Art (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000). 44 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Collins, 1974), 65. 45 Larisa Dickson and Maryna Romanets, eds., Beauty, Violence, Representation (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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Figure 14. Yhonnie Scarce, Thunder Raining Poison, Dianne Tanzer Gallery, 2015. Figure 15. Michelangelo Buonarotti, Pieta, Vatican, 1498-99.

STRANGE OCCURANCES: Foreboding the End An armless pianist, mute concrete bell and motionless music boxes playing the familiar songs of life’s milestones. Sculpture heads being dug up in the garden, potatoes on the book shelves and a German language lesson announcing ‘this is normal’. A cabbage on the bedside table, cracked mud on the curtains, a concrete bollard resting on the opulent bed and monuments feasting on raw meat. Motionless people, fossilized furniture, rotting quinces and cracked plaster heads appear coherently commonplace in this idiosyncratic world. Rendered beautiful in their stillness and resembling ravishing Flemish still lives,46 what horrors would unleash if these scenes gained motion again?47 Through the unique tableau vivant style of cinematography, my films oscillate between two and three dimensions.48 The constant movement of the camera creates an illusion of motion contrasted against the photographic stillness of the scenes. This mesmerizing tension between the kinetic space and a two-dimensional image within the motion picture creates a sense of

46 An intricate and often symbolic painting of inanimate objects which originated in Antwerp in the mid 1600s by Flemish artists . Walter Liedtke, “Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published 2000, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nstl/hd_nstl.htm 47 This chapter predominantly references the film Terminus, although I used the tableau vivant cinematographic style for all of the presented films, creating a kinaesthetic effect. 48 Peter Sloane, “Kinetic Iconography: Wes Anderson, Sergei Parajanov, and the Illusion of Motion,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 60, no. 2 (2018). https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA546504139&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00404691&p=LitRC&sw=w

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collapsed time. A continuous series of still shots representing the distinctive temporal progression of film is reduced to its antithesis − a single photographic frame, a moment in space. This static kinesis creates a slow and meditative experience of watching. Looking and thinking is the only definitive action in the films experienced by each viewer, allowing for a unique, individual and intimate experience. Within this still and reflective space, objects and people begin to operate as mnemonic devices. Reminiscent of the surrealist painting by Rene Magritte (figure 16) or the symbolist painting by Petrov-Vodkin (figure 17), the absurdity of the composition, displacement of objects and the tension between real and staged will ideally evoke allegorical thinking. In this context, each element gains metaphorical significance, symbolising various important facets of humanity. As a product of my own associations and hopefully interpreted by my audience, in Terminus books naturally serve as an allegory for knowledge. Classical music references sophisticated cultural heritage. Staple food items such as potatoes, pumpkin and cabbage represent the basic sustenance of life. Home, with all of its rooms, serves as an analogy for the world. Family members represent the coexistent generations of humankind. Sculptural heads serve as a metaphor for consecutive political systems, manifesting the lingering presence of history in the contemporary world. Meat and red wine epitomise war and sacrifice. Concrete bollards embody our internalised fears and anxiety. The garden personifies the cycle of life. Autumn reflects temporality and indicates the end of the cycle. Broken, dysfunctional or fossilised, objects reference temporality and signal the inevitable end. Evoking nostalgia and a sense of foreboding, the absurdity of the displaced objects and sounds uncannily make sense. Making this film has been my way of witnessing the final moment of an epoch. The heights of its cultural achievements and the lows of its violence and wars represented here glide before our eyes, as though leading us into the tunnel of light towards death. Art critic Craig Owens poignantly summarises that:

Allegory is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete — an affinity which finds its most comprehensive expression in the ruin, which Walter Benjamin identified as the allegorical emblem par excellence. Here the works of man are reabsorbed into the landscape; ruins thus stand for history as an irreversible process of dissolution and decay, a progressive distancing from origin.49

Terminus is a farewell to the passing era, a eulogy with its slow, classical music soundtrack – in turn, an allegory to the requiem or a funerary march. Experienced within a random, unmonumental and banal domestic setting, the surreal and the allegorical is rendered true. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze compares the process of watching films to looking through the crystal-image of time and eliminating our memory where the past, captured in the cinematic image, merges with the present of the viewing experience.50 For the longest time, the camera pans through the closely cropped images of each Terminus scene revealing the panoramic picture only in the end. Surprisingly, the overall view often doesn’t match the perception we might have developed through looking at the details closely. Recreating life, chapter after chapter and scene after scene, we comprehend events only retrospectively, yet never entirely.

49 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” MIT Press 12 (1980), 70. https://mamm-edu.ru/img/user/special/allegorical%202.pdf 50 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema Two: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis, 1985), 262-270. https://monoskop.org/images/6/68/Deleuze_Gilles_Cinema_2_Time-Image.pdf

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Figure 16. Rene Magritte, Memory, Brussels, Belgium, 1948. Figure 17. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Bathing the Red Horse, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1912. In this painting the red horse is

said to symbolize Russia as well as ‘beauty’, another meaning of the word red in the Russian language.

CONCLUSION: The Tip of the Iceberg This paper has been produced in order to contextualize my practice, acknowledging the breadth of enquiry and the subject matter of work undertaken during my Honours year as a natural progression and accumulation of the preceding three years. Through research and reflection of a political, personal, autobiographical, sociological, and historical nature, I have sought to understand the sense of urgency with which I approach my work. In conclusion, the direction of my art has been influenced by the experience of living through a global pandemic, and the conditions imposed on me as a member of a particular society. These circumstances have been a catalyst for change and creative growth, through both the organic process of adopting low-fi film as my medium, and through an instinctive need to examine the larger world through an unfiltered and authentic domestic lens. Discovering the tradition of poetry in/as film through the work of directors such as Dziga Vetrov and Sergei Parajanov has allowed me to situate my work within an ongoing tradition and further examine modes of perception, interpretation and effect via exposure to a wealth of film theory. By reading postmodernist theorists such as John Berger and writers in the fields of psychology and neurology such as Gardner, Sylvester and LeDoux, I have been given invaluable insight into the power of non-verbal communication and the activation of memory and association through sensory means. All of these give me, ironically, a language with which to communicate my creative goals, and validate the simple act of ‘looking’ as a sophisticated process of absorbing complex information.

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And poetically in itself, producing this thesis has allowed me to activate the processes described in its pages. Namely, it is the end product of a series of films, fulfilling their desired aim of provoking a sensory response to be processed emotionally and mnemonically before being articulated through words, in an attempt to arrive at the discovery of meaning. I hope that through this analysis I have managed to imbue my work with an extensive understanding of its potential to convey what it means to ‘experience’ being human within these challenging times.

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Zaveri, “How Statues are Falling Around the World.” New York Times, June 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html

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Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1995. Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time: Reflections of Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. The Colour of Pomegranates. Directed by Sergei Parajanov. 1969; Soviet Union: Cosmos Film, 1969. “The Effects of Climate Change.” NASA. Accessed September 25, 2020. https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/ Wakefield, Jake. “Coronavirus: Zoom in Everyone’s Living Room.” BBC News, March 27, 2020.

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APPENDIX

The following images on pages 26-27 are film stills from Nina Sanadze, Embedded (11.37 mins), Wyndham Art Gallery, 10 September till 11 October, 2020. https://ninasanadze.com/selectedprojects/embedded/

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The following images on pages 28-34 are film stills from Nina Sanadze, Living Room series, Bus TV, Bus Projects, 15 July-16 September, 2020. https://ninasanadze.com/selectedprojects/living-room/

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