Nadav’s work forms part of the public collection at the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He recently exhibited a collection of portraits at the Shanghai Art Museum and his last solo show Keep Your Distance, appeared at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2005). Publications of his work include his first monograph, Beauty’s Nothing and an exhibition catalogue entitled Night. Nadav is currently working on his second monograph to be published in 2009.
Nadav Kander’s images, although diverse in subject matter, reveal a singular and strangely paradoxical sensibility - revealing a deep concern for humanity without reference to the human form. Like an archeologist, Nadav constructs a powerful sense of identity through the artifacts of our civilization. Unlike our great stories and works of art, these artifacts do not embellish our achievements or ennoble our intentions, but reveal who we really are.
This form of abstraction is taken to its extreme in a series entitled “signs that we exist”, in which the incidental and cast off ephemera of daily life are elevated and imbued with poetic and haunting significance. This attention to microscopic detail reveals the obsessive and compulsive nature of artistic vision.
The sequences from Chernobyl and China can be read as opposite sides of the same coin, minted to commemorate the consequences of human progress. In Pripyat the direct effects of the Chernobyl accident were mostly invisible. Cursed, abandoned, never to be reoccupied or redeveloped, entropy has been left to gradually dismantle the town, and restore the landscape to its natural state. With an ironic echo of the slogan “power is nothing without control”, these scenes reveal the perpetual battle civilization wages to maintain its precarious classical order, within an infinitely complex and unsympathetic universe.
The series Yangtze follows the river from mouth to source. It is one of China’s most important symbols, sustaining its people both physically and spiritually. In spite, or perhaps because of this it has become the stage for one the most dramatic periods of transformation in China’s history. Civilization is being wrenched from the earth by force, on an almost inconceivable and ultimately inhuman scale. A side effect of this civil engineering, whether intended or accidental, is a form of social engineering: humanity has become microscopic, ant-like, dwarfed by these colossal civil structures, engendering a hive mentality and a sense of submission to the state. And yet the human spirit survives and prospers in the shadows. These images are both terrifying and beautiful, and again pose universal questions about the relationship between nature and humanity.
