Artist in RESIDENCE: ATHEN KARDASHIAN& NINA MHACH DURBAN
The Sarah Kravitz Residency in London hosts Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban for a period of collaborative studio development, realised in partnership with Great Portland Estates. Working as a duo, their practice unfolds as an ongoing dialogue shaped by shared experience and collective memory.
Raised in London by Indian mothers, the artists draw on personal and cultural histories to construct installations that operate between archive and display. Community noticeboards form the central structure of their work, recalling schools, offices, and social clubs. These surfaces hold layered arrangements of found images, personal photographs, and everyday objects, creating dense compositions that invite close reading.
Bollywood headshots sit alongside domestic materials and decorative fragments, forming visual connections between glamour and intimacy. These juxtapositions reflect a diasporic sensibility, where identity is shaped across multiple cultural references. The works carry a sense of accumulation, where objects act as carriers of memory rather than fixed symbols.
The practice engages themes of family, migration, and matriarchal influence, with particular attention to the role of women within diasporic communities. Nostalgia operates as both structure and subject, drawing attention to adolescence, inheritance, and the ways personal histories are preserved and reassembled.
Their installations hold a balance between public and private space, where display becomes a method of organising memory. The work resists resolution, allowing fragments of identity and experience to remain in circulation rather than forming a single narrative.
