Nina Sanadze at National Gallery 'Victoria', Gertrude Contemporary and 'Casula' Powerhouse
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Nina Sanadze, a zionist artist, will be platformed by National Gallery Victoria (NGV) in a survey exhibition that opened on Friday.
Sanadze will also be featured in Casula Powerhouse’s 68th Blake Prize exhibition, scheduled to open on 18 May.
Sanadze was a proactive member of the z600 group chat and is a committed propagandist for the zionist colonial project.
As a 2023 studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary, Sanadze bullied and harassed artists of colour over their opposition to the colonisation and genocide of Palestine.
Four formal complaints were made, and a First Nations artist was compelled to remove themself from the studio program. However, Gertrude Contemporary continued to enable Sanadze. Although Sanadze was eventually removed from the program and scrubbed from its public record, Gertrude has, to date, failed to support or protect those she abused.
Other artists withdrew their applications from the studio program, citing an awareness of both Sanadze’s racism and Gertrude’s continued refusal to hold her accountable.
It is relevant that, during this time, influential zionist Anna Schwartz sat on the Gertrude Contemporary board.
Meanwhile, in a flourish of cognitive dissonance, NGV’s press kit tells us that Sanadze’s survey show ‘references colonial monuments’ to ‘question their emotional resonance’ and also ‘examines the use of bollards and barriers, and related concepts of public safety, personal freedom and trust in the community’.
NGV has been in possession of the z600 chat and other receipts exposing Sanadze’s racism. Ultimately, the institution decided to ignore these receipts and enable Sanadze. Consequently, a number of NGV staff have withheld their labour from Sanadze’s show.
NGV has long maintained ‘decolonial’ optics, extracting cultural capital from the labour of First Nations people in particular.
However, NGV is compromised by a number of violent funding and partnership relationships, including two zionist organisations: Schwartz Media and the Besen Family Foundation.
As we witness the daily horrors of bombardment, rubble, death and dismemberment in Gaza, it is difficult to view these references in Sanadze’s work as entirely accidental:
In December 2023, amongst innumerable other atrocities, displaced Palestinian men were arbitrarily abducted en masse from Khalifa bin Zayed and New Aleppo schools, where they were sheltering from Israel’s genocidal bombardment. The men were stripped, caged, abused and made to kneel on a street in northern Gaza.
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor and Al Jazeera concluded that a number of abducted Palestinian men had been tortured, sexually assaulted and executed by zionist forces. Palestinian women and girls also reported being beaten, strip-searched, and made to bear witness to the execution of their family members.
In response to this specific atrocity, Sanadze began propagating the most absurd and easily debunked hasbara.
Sanadze also described Palestinians as ‘animals’ and mocked the stripped abductees as ‘seriously overweight’, a comment to which she added a ‘vomit’ emoji.
In an effort to excuse IOF atrocities, Sanadze shared a post from US-based zionist propaganda organisation ‘StandWithUs’, featuring a portrait of zionist war criminal Golda Meir:
As a member of the z600, Sanadze actively participated in the zionist group chat’s raisons d’être: the targeting of those advocating for Palestinian liberation and the devising of pro-Israel propaganda.
Within the group chat, Sanadze identified individuals for targeting, including contemporary artists Hoda Afshar and James Ngyuen, and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
Sanadze referred to Albanese as ‘disgusting’ and to Ngyuen as ‘very disturbing’.
To a zionist, identity politics is a blunt instrument. On 23 November, during a z600 discussion on coordinating and deodorising pro-Israel propaganda, Sanadze made the following cringeworthy contribution:
..ideas could be developed. Education through fun and engaging talks? Focus on wellbeing, peace and tolerance. If we are talking to the “woke” we need people who they will respect. Indigenous people, people of colour, lgbtqia+ (but not Jewish people) like Marcia Langton. Did you see her article?
On 27 November, Sanadze shared an easily debunked hasbara video to the group chat, which she recommended as:
A discussion about Jews being indigenous to Israel and Palestinians absolutely not.
As many have already observed, the shameless entitlement of the z600 group chat only leaves us to wonder: how truly despicable must the messages ‘deleted by admin’ have been?
The zionist group chat’s admin Lee Koffman saw fit to delete 17 messages by Nina Sanadze.
According to its website, Casula Powerhouse:
...aims to draw on the strengths of its community, and to make work that speaks to people both locally and globally.
The platforming of a zionist – like any other kind of racist, colonialist or genocidal supremacist – will always be antithetical to community. There is no safe society in which a zionist can be represented, institutionally protected or rewarded.