Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian (Armenian: Նինա Խաչատուրյան; born 1968, Stanford, California) is an Armenian-American artist. She is known for conceptual works that explore themes of mapping, translation, and public space. A multimedia artist, she works across photography, sculpture, video, and sound—often in playful ways.

Her projects have been exhibited widely, including a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in July 2008, the Turku Art Museum in Finland in January 2006, the ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the forthcoming exhibition.

Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California in 1968, and grew up spending summers on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. She received a BA from Brown University in 1989, and an MFA from UCSD in 1993. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City in 1996. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is on the faculty at New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Nina Katchadourian has worked in many media, including sculpture, photography, video, and sound. The underlying concept is often marked by an intrinsic sense of humor, characterized by a whimsical, intelligent, ironic and systemic reordering of natural processes. Her work is simple yet effective.

Many of Katchadourian's pieces involve bringing a whimsical kind of order to the world. The "Sorted Books" series, for instance, ranges from ephemeral and impromptu arrangements of volumes on the shelves of friends, to commissioned photographed orderings of books in museum and library collections. The body of work is available as a book published by Chronicle Books.

Her "mended spider webs" series involves making careful but obvious "repairs" to the rips that occur in natural spiderwebs. Using tweezers and glue she continued the pattern of the spider webs with starched bright red twine. The tools used to repair these spider webs can also be found in her "Do-it Yourself Spiderweb Repair Kit" piece, also part of the "Mended Spider Webs" series. While working on the series, Katchadourian became interested in how nature feels about humans attempt to 'help'. The next morning she found that the spiders did not appreciate her help. When she went out to the first spiderweb repair the following morning she found the red twine unraveled and lying on the ground below. The spiders had rejected her help and undone all of her work throughout the night. Katchadourian was able to capture the rejection process on tape in a 10 min video titles "GIFT/GIFT".

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