Nina Katchadourian’s Origin Stories threads through Seattle’s National Nordic Museum with five projects that explore family and memory, play and reenactment.
If you’re a good museum visitor and do things in order (which is an extended joke and conflict in much of Katchadourian’s work), you first visit her 2021 epic To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World—epic on many levels. To enter it, you jump into the deep end of a deep blue and dense installation, as well as scan a QR code linking you to over two hours of audio that form the backbone of the project (well worth every second). The artist created the work during the pandemic in response to Survive the Savage Sea, a book written by Dougal Robertson, a farmer-cum-sailor who, along with his family, survived a 1972 killer whale attack that left them adrift in the Pacific for thirty-eight days.
The installation goes day-by-day with scale renderings of fish, turtles, and whales, small toys or fruit or candy, a cup of coffee, drawings, wire sculptures, and remakes of significant tools in the story. These are paired with wall texts listing relevant audio clips. The objects range from metaphorical (Lindt chocolates as fish eyeballs), to indexical (a scale map of Robertson’s salvational dinghy on the floor) to recreations of artifacts. The recreations are the funniest and would satisfy even the most photorealistic props master: during the journey, sea turtle oil turned out to be a cure-all, and Katchadourian remakes the sailors’ stash with sunflower oil in an exact replica of the original bottle.
Installation view: Nina Katchadourian: Origin Stories, National Nordic Museum, Seattle, 2025. Courtesy the National Nordic Museum. Photo: Jim Bennett / Photo Bakery.
The room is strongly reminiscent of an exhibit in a children's museum, and creates a similar inquisitive distance from a harrowing topic (any parent who’s seen a four-year-old learn about climate change in a cheery exhibition will recognize this strangeness). In contrast, listening to the seventy-one-track conversation is like bingeing perfect television. The artist’s conversation with Douglas Robertson is immersive and emotional; where the life-sized dorado drawing asks for curiosity, Robertson’s retelling of the tense minutes spent spearing it and watching it die asks for your soul.
On her decades-long obsession with the story Katchadourian muses:
There’s this kind of ceaseless invention—the problem solving with a lot at stake requires these creative solutions to things… I’ve thought about this with certain artistic projects of my own, that it takes a kind of optimism, I think, to look around the world and say, “You know what, there is something here, it’s not all a lost cause.”
The Nordic Museum’s home in Ballard, a formerly working class, historically Scandinavian maritime neighborhood (now gentrified) connects neatly with both Nordic and sea-faring topics in the artist’s work. The artist’s Finland-Swedish maternal heritage is mentioned in the curatorial statement. And there is a melancholy and enduring homesickness in this part of Seattle that I feel Origin Stories honors. Behind the museum runs the Ship Canal, and a block away you can sail through the Ballard Locks to the cold waters of the Puget Sound. They’re scenic, but full of human trouble: there are sailboats and ferries of course, but also massive Chinese tankers, nuclear submarines, and the memories of all sailors and shipwrights who never made it back ashore. The curators point out that only a few blocks away, one can contemplate the monument to fishermen lost at sea.
Installation view: Nina Katchadourian: Origin Stories, National Nordic Museum, Seattle, 2025. Courtesy the National Nordic Museum. Photo: Jim Bennett / Photo Bakery.
The allure and threat of the sea is at the core of The Recarcassing Ceremony, a 2016 video featuring archival recordings from the artist’s childhood, family interviews, and a detailed recreation of the titular ceremony with Playmobil figures. The video is beautiful, with primary-colored plastic toys (and 3D-printed replicas) against the granite and waves of the southern Finnish archipelago. 1980s vintage family recordings of Katchadourian and her brother’s strangely high childhood voices chant and wail over the toys, deadly serious but also cracking up as they re-carcass the souls of two Playmobil characters who drowned in a riptide.
Each work enacts a kind of return: to thirty-eight days spent adrift in the Pacific, or to the rocks on which children played. And in The Nightgown Pictures (1997–2003), another return occurs as Katchadourian attempts to find the precise location of a series of photographs of her mother around the family summer home. In Talla (2025), debuting here, the return is to the serious play of her grandfather. Talla, it turns out, is a cow. More specifically, a bronze cast of a cow built by the artist’s grandfather for her mother out of sticks and preserved by the artist’s family for three generations. Unassumingly installed in a courtyard to one side of a sauna built by an Estonian local one hundred years ago, this return is enacted in the process of casting. It has a lifelike quality, standing there like a medium-sized dog, half-hiding in the shrubs; Talla is at-scale, and it’s a funny scale—a parent’s imaginative devotion held in tiny form.
In much of the artist’s work, meaning is linked, tied, and compared to other meaning; image to image; word to word-in-accent. On one level, it’s comforting; Katchadourian can show how the world might make sense. But in this exhibition, the comfort is left behind and instead we are led along the world's fraying edge—quite literally to the rocky edges of our oceans and seas. We crouch on the coast of the Pacific, of the Atlantic, the Baltic, our small and hopeful gestures of play, art, and survival perpetually raveling the unraveled, preserving us just another day.
