Every summer, on the island of Pörtö in Finland, Nina Katchadourian and her brother Kai played with toy figures, whom they had divided into two families, every one of them named. The Sjöbloms and Båtsmans led busy lives: skiing, mountaineering, printing, putting on plays. The diorama the artist has assembled for the Biennale Arte 2026 resurrects this dream world.
The siblings approached this play as puppeteers, games masters, quasi-ethnographers. The toys became so real and alive that one day, when the paterfamilias Matti Båtsman and his son Steve were caught in a riptide, Kai plunged in to rescue them and was nearly swept out to sea as well. The children improvised a ritual – The Recarcassing Ceremony – to bring Matti and Steve back to life. Katchadourian’s parents documented the ritual on a cassette tape, which the artist used to re-enact the ceremony thirty-five years later.
With her celebrated series Seat Assignment (2010-2021), Katchadourian refuses to accept the boredom of a long flight but fills it with play – the seat belt, the airline tray, the sparse amenities of air travel become her toys. The resulting photographs play with scale, illusions of proximity, anamorphoses and absurdity, exemplifying the Surrealist maxim, to find the marvellous in the everyday.
—Marina Warner
