Please Note: As the exhibition contains a critical audio component which is only accessible via QR codes, visitors are asked to arrive with a QR-compatible smartphone or tablet and a personal headphone set
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Catharine Clark Gallery opens its 2021 program with To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World, a solo exhibition of new work by multi-disciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian, on view January 9 – February 20, 2021. The artist’s first solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery since 2014, Katchadourian’s long-awaited presentation invites viewers into an immersive and deeply personal work about resourcefulness, hope, and creative capacity under duress.
When Katchadourian was seven years old, her mother read a book aloud to her titled Survive the Savage Sea (1973), the true story of the Robertsons, a family of farmers in England who sold all their possessions to buy a sailboat, with the intent of sailing around the world for several years. In June 1972, the Robertsons lost their sailboat in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean when a pod of Orca smashed the hull, leaving the four adults and two children adrift for 38 days. Survive the Savage Sea, written by Dougal Robertson, the father, was published the following year, based on the log book he kept while adrift.
The Robertson family’s narrative was subsequently translated into 14 languages and adapted into a 1992 television movie. Katchadourian has fixated on this story since childhood, rereading the book nearly every year. In the spring of 2020, Katchadourian wrote to Douglas Robertson, the family’s oldest son, to ask if he would agree to an interview as part of the project the artist intended to undertake that summer between June 15 – July 22, 2020, the time period corresponding to the 38 days of the Robertson family shipwreck.
This 38-day conversation took place across a series of daily recorded phone calls from the artist’s home in Berlin to Robertson’s home in London. Katchadourian and Robertson discussed the details of each day’s events for the castaways, as well as deeper questions around the mental shift from rescue to survival, and how invention and resourcefulness function in a situation where the stakes could not be higher. These accounts of ingenuity under pressure are central to the story’s ongoing magnetism for Katchadourian and resonate with the artist’s continued explorations of the relationship between creativity and constraint.
To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World, by extension, invites viewers into a personal-museological exhibition of videos, sculptures, photographs, drawings, text message exchanges, and excerpts from the nearly 50 hours of audio recordings. As a way trying to understand the scale of the animals they hunted for food, Katchadourian made life-size paper models of every animal the Robertsons caught and ate, often mailing them to Douglas for feedback and further discussion.
The installation transforms the gallery space into ocean and vessel for both the story of the shipwreck and the intimate conversation between Robertson and Katchadourian that took place. There is particular resonance to the subject of a shipwreck at the end of the year that has just passed, as so many have experienced isolation and uncertainty, unsure of what rescue and survival will require. The title of the exhibition is a phrase from one of the interviews, where Douglas Robertson expresses his feeling of disbelief at the sight of the ship that rescued them, refusing to believe it was possible even once the ship turned their way. When Katchadourian asks at what point he finally believed it, he answers, “The rope…To feel something that was not us, that was not of our world—that was so good.”
