˚⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ Interview » Athen Kardashian + Nina Mhach Durban.໑⋆˚⊹
on finding, keeping, and passing it on
Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban have a keen eye for what it means to collect. Whether it’s the collaging of found ephemera that happens in teenage bedrooms or their Indian grandmothers’ repurposing of single-use plastics, the British-Asian artist duo’s practice traces how images and objects are passed on through people, houses, and borders. DVDs stack to create shrines for trinkets and framed photographs, images ripped from the internet are printed out and proudly wear their watermarks, a blown up postcard of the New York City skyline slowly fades under the sun’s harsh rays. Every piece is a priceless treasure on the verge of disintegration.
The two have shown extensively in the UK, but have goals to exhibit their work stateside, complete with a cross-country road trip. I recently talked with Athen and Nina. We discussed their creative process, working with found material, and the duo’s ability to make themselves at home within the confines of the gallery.
I'm interested in what your individual practices were like prior to working together. Has it really changed or were you both iterating upon the same thing individually?
Athen: We were working with similar themes, but Nina's work was much more large scale and quite classy, in my opinion, and minimal, focusing a lot on found imagery. Whereas mine was very maximalist. It was either drawing, which I still do, or very bitty collages with a lot of dirty found things made with stationary/office or school supplies. Then we kind of merged them together.
Nina: In the next year or so we’ll have collaborated for longer than our individual practices. But I think at the beginning, it did feel like what you're saying. I was coming from a strict fine art background, unlike Athen; and I'm not a maker in that sense, I don't like crafts. I didn't love working with my hands.
Athen: Nina initially was on the computer finding the images and I was doing the mucky stuff.
Nina: We've gone beyond that now and those roles have completely merged. It’s much more fluid. Basically, we could not make art by ourselves now. It's so intertwined, the making process. I can't even conceptualize trying to see an idea all the way through by myself.
Athen: It’d just be shit.
Nina: It'd be so shit.
Athen: We were just talking about it this morning. When we both were working separately, doing the conceptual stuff, we'd get into really unnecessary rabbit holes. We'd take it way too far.
Nina: We hold each other accountable. If Athen starts to go down a hole that I'm really not interested in, I'm just like, oh, and you are the same to me. And that's really good. Because if you're not interested in it, I don't think anyone else is going to be.
Only conceptual rabbit holes?
Athen: Well, now we go down material rabbit holes.
Nina: I do pride our practice on the fact that we find some material that we like and we beat it until it can't do anything…
Athen: And then we somehow keep on using it! Especially in the past year, our focus has been material-based. Through that, we try to unpack what emotions and ideas those materials themselves represent.
Nina: Like an experience, something quite transient that we're trying to distill. We're trying to echo the experience in a piece of art. Which doesn't really work [laughs].
Athen: We try though. We try really hard.
Do the images often come first because your work is so found-image heavy?
Nina: For the first two years, it had been more image led. We're trying to shift into a more physical way of thinking. The images have been great, but sometimes they're a bit too easy. We tended to use a lot of images of really conventionally beautiful women. Therefore, the work almost could just look beautiful because of this. It felt like we could lean on the images, which we didn’t want. We wanted our work to push us more and do more.
Athen: Over the time we've been working together, we've slowly transitioned into more installation-based art. We can't rely on an image in the way we've done before, because it's more object-based. That really excites us, because how can we translate that same feeling without using the obvious things or the beautiful image?
Nina: There were moments when we were curating shows and it was just like, there are so many people looking at me right now. This is so unenjoyable because it's faces, faces, faces, like pretty people everywhere. Is that actually what our work was about? Obviously not.
Athen: When we started out, a part of our practice did focus around these non-Western icons or faces who we grew up loving, alongside the powers of women and home-making. It was challenging the monopoly that “the West” has over beauty standards and aesthetics, especially within the media and in the art world. Now it maybe seems we've moved on slightly or try to deal with this in a less obvious way.
Nina: We're carrying those women through in different ways and we're creating slightly more distance between them and the viewer. We're not giving them to the viewer really easily.
Athen: Because they’re real people. You don’t own them. And we certainly don’t either.
Nina: The images in your house would not be a really high-quality printed picture on the wall. It'd be an image that's wrapped in tape, like Athen’s Nani did, or an image that's gone through some transition, like my Nani’s sunbleached deities or expired calendars.
Athen: What we always tend to come back to is the idea of history taking effect on objects and on images, how they decay and curl and change color and how we protect them, how we reutilize them over the years and over all the places it has lived as well. We might tamper with an image and water stain it, sun bleach it, cover it in tape or whatever. We're really trying to build this almost fake history that resembles that of an image or item in the household. You don't know what it's seen. You don't know what it's been through. You don't know who has held it or where it came from. It's just kind of always been there without question.
Did you grow up with a lot of that in your own households?
Athen: Yeah, especially our grandmothers.
Nina: Both our mothers are Indian. We both grew up going to their mum's houses. It's more so our nanis and how they've made their houses.
Athen: Was your grandma Joyce’s yard not like that too? Claire, my Irish Grandma’s flat totally was, it was so inspiring growing up. It was balls to the wall decorations everywhere. My Grandma's bedroom was mustard yellow, with pictures of Jesus everywhere and this big crucifix which had Jesus on it and lit up red at night. And two twin beds with three quilts on and browny green carpet.
Nina: My Nani has two beds and she only sleeps in one of them. One of them's just for storage. She's got a double bed and a single bed. She sleeps in the single bed. The double bed is incredible. It has folded newspapers and folded clothes and pictures all over it. It's like a curated thing but it's not.
Athen and Nina in unison: It’s amazing.
Athen: My Grandma also had this vanity in her bedroom that had like a thousand bottles of little perfumes and products. Some of them were like 50 years old. Just all over, dust and prairie beads and lipsticks all over the surface. Our mums and dads ultimately grew up in those environments and then kind of pushed up against it. Our mums feel stressed out when there's too much going on. That's why I think we have this balance.
Nina: We have a distance. We can go into these houses that they grew up in and see them through a lens that our mums can't because they grew up within it. It's just what they're used to.
Athen: Both our mums were forced to do really traditional work in the sense of having to please their parents. Because of that, we're allowed to make art, although our grandparents still never really came around to it.
You're embedding your own iconography inside of it as well.
Athen: You know when you're a teenager and you stick every receipt you've ever had and every photo like all over your walls? We'd be doing that but we'd be given this random Indian stuff that either our mums were getting rid of or our grandparents had given to us. So it would be this weird collage of Rihanna and an Arctic Monkeys ticket and a Ganesh sculpture. And then always the incense and always the sequins and mirrored diamonds. There would be this natural overlap of excessive aesthetics that we both refined individually in our bedrooms over the years, and still do to this day.
Your work feels so natural and restrained, which can be very difficult when you're working with a lot of materials, especially found objects and media. You have a really good eye for when to stop.
Athen: Well, there's also two of us.
Nina: Especially when we were doing the more board-based works, we'd spend a day and we'd be 95 percent done and it would take us maybe two days to do the last five percent, which would be moving or adding a pin between different places and removing one little sticker. It’s often the smallest minute details that take us the longest.
Athen: I also think maybe that's got to do with a pressure we put on ourselves to toe the line between fine art, accessibility and cultural references. [Our work] is trying to redefine this high art notion of minimalism that is so inherently Western. Adding, and taking things away, and changing things, breaking and rebuilding—a lot of our pieces have been multiple pieces before. Sometimes a curator will ask for a piece that doesn’t even exist anymore. This idea of recycling and reusing and forcing it all together is something we really want to push. The more minimalist it gets, often the less personal it becomes. There’s a level of intimacy—like sharing a secret—we want to achieve.
Nina: It's also a practical thing that we're constantly reworking these [pieces] because we don't always have the means to find new materials or the space to store them. It’s only recently that we have a studio that is big enough to finally have everything in one space. We would be in the studio and be really itching to make something and we'd look at a piece that's been sitting there for a couple of months, hasn't been shown and is never going to get sold, we’d be like, let’s just take it off and do something because we’re itching to make.
Athen: It's so perfect because it's the same idea of adding history to an object. There are certain notice boards that we've remade and have since sold or shown where if you look on the side you can see traces of glue or tape or paper. In a funny way, it’s like when artist historians x-ray old paintings and it exposes that the final painting sits atop of several other paintings, all just layered and hidden. It's the same with the printed images that we reuse after having been bleached by the sun or having had little drawing pin holes poked in it. It is something we manufacture and that occurs naturally as well. It’s blurring the line between fact and fiction.
You both grew up in London. How did you meet?
Nina: We’ve known of each other since we were 15, just from running in semi-similar circles, but we officially met at an art foundation, which in England you do between secondary school and university most commonly. It's one year where you go and make art.
Athen: And it was free at the time...
Nina: I don't know if it’s free anymore, but it was a really amazing opportunity when it was.
Athen: Most people do one in order to get into an art university afterwards, but also there's a lot of people who do it if they're not going on to do a creative degree after, just to have a year solely committed to making art. We met there, but we weren't really friends. We weren't not friends, we just never hung out.
Nina: No, but we had all the same friends.
How did you come to start working together?
Athen: Well, we always really respected each other's work and were making a lot of work around similar themes of pop culture and modern identity. Nina went away to study in Manchester and I stayed in London working. Through Instagram and our mutual friends, we'd kept track of each other.
Nina: We'd always say to our mutual friends how much we respected each other's practices and it would always trickle back to us, which was lovely.
Athen: Throughout the years, we would try loosely to collaborate on things. That only really happened when Nina was back from university, having graduated. We planned to make a piece together and, well, never stopped.
What was the first piece?
Nina: It was meant to be this big board.
Athen: We haven't done it yet. It's had like three iterations.
Nina: It's incredible even to think back to that and how it all kind of happened. It really did just roll on and we didn't think about it too much. I don't think we could have ever predicted that it would have become this.
Athen: I think we were planning to make just that one piece together. Now it's been two and a half years.
Nina: Now we’re kind of married and have a joint life and career.
What's your relationship to collecting? Your saving and collecting of images is mirrored physically. I imagine you in the studio next to a giant pile of “I ♥︎ NY” pins.
Nina: We were organizing [in the studio] all day. We literally have to be like, “Should I start a box for ‘I Love New York’ merch?” The way we have to organize our stuff is so funny.
Athen: A nail polish box, a Go-Go’s box, key chains, magnets, London stuff, all of it. We both are fine line hoarders. The lines become so blurred between our personal lives and our practice. A lot of the things we find either at home or when we're out and about in the world, we end up putting into our work.
Nina: My bedroom does feel quite a bit empty at the moment, because a lot of my really nice stuff is at the studio.
Athen: I'm good because a large [portion] of my personal decorations at home have to do with comics and horror. So I know that’s safe.
Nina: My Taylor [Swift] stuff is fine.
Athen: Yeah, me with my horror, her with her Taylor Swift. But it is all encompassing. We’re always in conversation about things we like. On the days we don’t see each other, we’ll send each other pictures of random shit we’ve seen alongside endless things on Instagram.
Nina: We're both also working jobs, so trying to find time to be in the studio is quite difficult. That means our practice does kind of live in this ether of us throwing things at each other. We'll finally get in the studio and the work will happen really quickly because we have spent so long separately milling over things and sending ideas and inspiration to one another. We've been moving studios so often that we've not had the space or time to really go through our collection. Now, I think a whole new body of work will come from the fact that we've had the time to sit with this stuff and to look at it and to categorise it.
Athen: A lot of first gen migrants have a tendency to hoard things that they deem having the potential to be useful. It’s an obviously resourceful lifestyle that is so against the quick capitalism most of us succumb to. It can be a slippery slope though, at least in our experiences. The only thing that I remember always being thrown away at my grandparents or the Ji’s were empty crisp packets because they were greasy and you couldn’t reshut them. Other than that, yellowed Tupperware, plastic bags that you wash, empty CD cases, empty sauce bottles, miscellaneous pieces of string and everything else were all stored away in random cupboards.
Nina: I always think about the fact that when I stay at my nan’s and when she gives me a pack lunch for the next day, she gives it to me in medical biohazard bags from when my granddad had cancer because she is like, I need to use them. So I turn up to work with my medical biohazard lunch.
Athen: The amount of times we go home for family get-togethers and an auntie or your nani will give you a plastic bag full of daal. And you think, “Okay, cool, that's going in the freezer.” Just a plastic bag filled with curry. Another thing we always talk about is when your auntie or nani gives you Tupperware, even though they have 50,000…
Nina: They’re going to remember that!
Athen: You know they’re going to ask for it back until the day one of you dies.
How do you approach showing your work, which often deals with domestic interiors, in an exhibition context?
Athen: Initially, we’ll see the space and we'll look for the architectural features of it that sing to us.
Nina: We’ll be with a curator, and say, “Give us one second.” One of us will crawl on the floor, and be like, “This is really great, we should use this.”
Athen: It is really looking at the nooks and crannies of the space for where things could hide and exist more so than the walls themselves. There will be a theme we want to play with, and all the work will relate to the world we’ve built, but be dealing with this theme in particular. Our most recent solo [show] at Indigo+Madder was based on the material, the texture, the aging of paper, and how sun bleaches, we used all these to examine and explore grief. Before that, we were at Sadie Coles' shop and that was really about creating an insular environment that transformed this fancy small space into something fun and cosy that it hadn't been before.
Nina: To put your work on display is one of the most exciting things you can do as an artist. To get to have these whole spaces, why would we just stick things on the wall when we can fill this and this and this? It's so exciting. You don’t get to do that in your studio. You don't have the space to play and you don’t get it interacting with other people. With Forma, we did the Selena [Quintanilla] installation on the long vitrine. They had offered us the most incredible space.
Athen: They wanted us to put in pre-existing work.
Nina: We were like, “No, that is the most incredible space in the world. We need to fill it.” We did the most insane install of Selena wallpaper. We couldn't not.
Athen: It would be wasted otherwise.
Nina: Athen had bought me the cassette when she was in America and it had always been ticking in our brains. Then we got given this space that was essentially the dimensions of the cassette blown up.
Athen: We had the cassette in our studio for maybe six months before this opportunity came to us. It ended up being 423 pieces of paper individually cut and pasted one by one.
Are those the liner notes of the cassette?
Nina: Yeah, it's the lyrics, and [inside of it] was her life story.
Athen: With these beautiful scans of little trinkets that are Photoshopped in, which speak so much to what we do in our work.
Nina: I have a spatial brain. I look at buildings and I want to fill them with things. I really want to be felt in a space. We can do that through small work as well. That’s one of the many things you’ve [Athen] taught me. You can occupy space with little things as well.
Athen: That’s why I like the secrets.
You can find Athen and Nina on Instagram, as well as Tumblr. They have a limited-edition print available for purchase through Penélope Archive and their Captive Heart installation at Forma is on view through May 18.