Sana Shahmuradova Tanska
‘Ghosts of the Fields’, 2023, oil on canvas, 140 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery
‘Gillie suit’, 2023, oil on canvas, 85.6 x 61 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery
‘A Nightmare of not Being Able to Enter the Black Sea’, 2023, oil on canvas, 144 x 139 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery
Sana’s paintings on canvas and drawings revolve around a dialogue with the experiences of previous generations. Motifs, stories or ideas she engages with are always in some way linked to attempts at understanding her family’s traumatic past. Through a personal lens, Sana also reflects on the experience of the country and her own place within it, since the history of trauma never truly ends.
When describing her sense of her own position and artistic practice, Sana draws on the metaphor of the abyss, used by the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus, who died in a russian prison in 1985. There is always an abyss beneath our feet, and our efforts are constantly directed towards filling it, towards building ground beneath us. Sana returns to this idea directly or metaphorically. The full-scale war has raised the question of why so much from the past has remained undone, unnoticed or unprocessed. Reflecting on her family’s experiences—her Azerbaijani father from Karabakh, three generations of refugees in his family, her grandmother’s fear of the past and her grandfather’s wish to share silenced stories—the artist projects these traumatic stories onto her own experiences and the experiences of the country, seeking to narrate and work through this pain in her artistic practice.
In terms of artistic language, the emotional force of saturated pigment and the dynamic of the forms she creates are of utmost importance to Sana: ‘I always try to see the movement and capture it’. The figures in her works serve as symbolic representations of experiences and individual destinies: ‘These are the experiences of previous generations, with which we engage in direct dialogue and which we are still deciphering’. Over the past two years, a sense of impending apocalypse has emerged in her works. Yet in her practice, she also fulfils a desire to connect generations, to believe in the spirits that are always with us and to draw on this experience in redefining her own subjectivity.
