Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian is an accomplished American artist who has demonstrated her creative prowess across a variety of mediums, including sculpture, photography, video, and sound. Her most renowned project is 'Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style,' a collection of self-portraits captured in the confined spaces of airplane restrooms.

Biography of Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian was born in 1968 in Stanford, California. She completed her high school education at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California. She earned a B.A. degree from Brown University in 1989. Later, in 1993, she obtained an M.F.A. degree from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Additionally, she participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1996.

Katchadourian's video titled 'Accent Elimination' was showcased in the Armenian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where the pavilion earned the prestigious Golden Lion award for Best National Participation.

A retrospective exhibition featuring her art, titled 'Curiouser,' premiered at the Blanton Museum in 2017, subsequently touring the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University and the BYU Art Museum.

She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and Berlin, Germany.

Nina Katchadourian’s art style

Numerous artworks by Katchadourian revolve around imbuing the world with an incisive and whimsical sense of order.

Her "Sorted Books" series unfolded across various locations, ranging from personal residences to specialized book collections. Katchadourian meticulously sifts through book collections, extracting specific titles, and then assembles the books into clusters, creating a coherent sequence of titles. The ultimate results manifest as either photographic depictions of these book groupings or as tangible stacks, often displayed on the original library shelves from which they originated.

In her 1994 performance titled "CARPARK" at Southwestern College, Katchadourian undertook the task of categorizing numerous cars across multiple parking lots based on their colors. Then, in a 2006 project supported by the Public Art Fund, she positioned a telescope on a street corner in Manhattan. This telescope was focused on a 17th-floor office of a nearby building. Throughout the project, the inhabitant of the office, a lawyer, deliberately arranged objects on the windowsill to convey encrypted messages to the observer.

In her "Mended spider webs" series, Katchadourian engages in meticulous yet conspicuous "restoration" of the rips found in authentic spiderwebs. Using tweezers and glue, she extends the natural pattern of these webs using vibrant, starched red twine. In this project, Katchadourian's curiosity turned toward nature's response to human intervention and help. When revisiting the initial spiderweb mend, she observed the unraveled red twine resting on the ground below. Katchadourian adeptly documented the process of rejection, capturing it on video in a 10-minute piece titled "GIFT/GIFT."

In 2016, Katchadourian fulfilled a commission titled "Floater Theater" for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, a piece that has since become a permanent installation. During the same year, she conceived "Dust Gathering," an immersive audio tour centered around the topic of dust, as a contribution to the Museum of Modern Art's initiative "Artists Experiment."