testsite 13.4

Return Trip

Nina Katchadourian and Regine Basha

September 15th - November 10th, 2013

share with a friend:

Nina Katchadourian, stills from video “Lucy’s Bomb Story” in 30 Years 21 Minutes 17 Tapes (1991/1993), courtesy of the artist. Shown at Testsite September 15–November 10, 2013.

Project Details

For testsite’s tenth-anniversary show, Return Trip, co-founder Regine Basha brings home the artist who inspired the idea for testsite: Brooklyn-based Nina Katchadourian.

The two will present the artist's earliest and rarely-exhibited video work, 30 Years 21 Minutes 17 Tapes (1991/1993). This lush collection is comprised of super-8 and 8mm home movies from the Katchadourian family collection combined with film footage shot in response to the archival family material. Many of the artist’s current interests are present as seedlings in this early work: concerns with family relations and storytelling, taxonomies, an attentiveness to nature, an attraction to the absurd and to sonic/visual interplay, and a desire to mingle the everyday with the sublime. In a live discussion on September 15 at testsite, the artist and the curator will explore the dilemmas, attractions, and challenges of working with family footage.

An interview with Nina Katchadourian.

Nina Katchadourian (Brooklyn, New York) was born in Stanford, California and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media including photography, sculpture, video and sound. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, and the Palais de Tokyo. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland featured a solo show of works made in Finland, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled Nina Katchadourian: All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installations in July 2008. In February 2010 she was the artist in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she had a solo show entitled Seat Assignment. She recently worked on a permanent, public art installation entitled Grand State of Maine, commissioned by the GSA for a border crossing station between the United States and Canada. In April 2013 Chronicle Books published the monograph Sorted Books on the 20-year anniversary of Katchadourian's Sorted Books project. Katchadourian is on the faculty at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study and she is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Regine Basha was born in Israel to Iraqi parents, grew up in Montreal and Los Angeles, attended New York University, Concordia University (Studio Art and Art History), and graduated from Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies’ inaugural class of 1996. Her website project Tuning Baghdad features recordings, interviews and archival super-8 home movie footage of the Iraqi-Jewish music scene and its history. Basha began working as a curator in 1992 (Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montreal, 1992-1995) and since arriving in New York for graduate school she has conceived of innovative exhibitions for both private and public spaces nationally and internationally. In 2002, Basha moved to Austin, Texas and became co-founder of Fluent~Collaborative and testsite with Laurence Miller. She also held the position of Adjunct Curator at Arthouse in Austin from 2002-2007, where she curated seminal exhibitions with artists such as Daniel Bozhkov and Dario Robleto. Her exhibitions in New York and in Austin have received grant awards from The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as critical press in The New York Times, Artforum, Modern Painters, Art Papers, Wire, Bidoun, Art Lies, and on NPR Radio. Recent projects include the exhibition The Rules of Basketball: Works by Paul Pfeiffer at The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin; the pop-up restaurant Dar Al Suhl with artist Michael Rakowitz; and most recently she is launching the newly-built Studio Program for the Queens Museum of Art (opening October 2013). She sits on the board of Art Matters and Aurora Picture Show.

testsite 13.4

Return Trip

Nina Katchadourian and Regine Basha

Project Details

Additional Links and Resources

More from the Archive