Facing Changi, 2011
The workshop FACING CHANGI presents a monumental painting in four sections measuring approximately one by five meters long featuring face-portraits of artist Nina11 and 21 male inmates from Cluster B at Changi Prison in Singapore.
In 2011 when she was invited to conduct an art workshop at the prison’s Art Hub she was sure that it would be fun for the inmates to learn to create their own self-portrait using this experiential process.
Although unique, Nina11’s process of transferring the three-dimensional facial features of a sitter onto a flat surface to create a portrait has been used in the past. The most well-known example is The Shroud of Turin, the concept for her Changi portraits was to simultaneously present the equality and differences of the inmates in real life, and moreover to involve them in the artistic process by bringing the excitement and laughter while they painted each other’s faces.
The artist believes that the FACING CHANGI workshop embodies the humanistic and intrinsic values that should be cherished by both socially deviant and socially acceptable individuals.
COLORS OF CORDOVA, 2015
The blackness or darkness of the canvases by international artist Nina11 represents the harshness and poverty of the poor citizens who live in Camolinas Housing Cordova. Nina11’s paintings strike you with colorful silhouettes, the faces of children and their family members shinning with radiance and positive energy.
The workshop COLORS OF CORDOVA consists of a triptych of three canvases each 32 inches high by six feet long, which contain portraits of more than 60 children and parents. Each participant directly applied oil paint to one another's face and then pressed their faces into the canvas, leaving a precise colorful profile.
When inviting the artist Nina11 to Camolinas Housing Cordova, Johannes Leib (JusticeF, Board of Director) and Erlee Adrian Pastorlera (Education Coordinator, SIGNAsia Foundation) wanted the children to be not only part of the artist’s process but also to become artists themselves. In addition, they wanted to bring a parent and child closer together in an extraordinary creative activity; in other words, to switch their thoughts from the routine of life.
It is a true blessing and heartbreaking experience to witness how a five-year-old child applies brush strokes to her grandmother’s face, and vice-versa, how a fish man is painted in his son’s favorite blue, or how two sisters laugh while painting pink around their noses, all while Cyndi Lauper sings, “True colors, that’s why I love you…”
THE LAST OF THE SURVIVORS, 2015
THE LAST OF THE SURVIVORS: this workshop by Nina11, features face-portraits of five survivors of labor and concentration camps in Germany during WWII:
Stanislav Yakovich Kaunov, Ivan Danilovich Smakograi, Avraham Levi, Othmar “Otto” Wundsam, Yakov Mikhailovich. Each was one of 60,000 inmates between August 1943 and March 1945 at Mittelbau-Dora, a sub-camp of Buchenwald concentration camp, which was one of the largest in Germany.
‘Dora,' as it was often called, was primarily a military factory, which was located inside the Kohnstein Mountain near the city Nordhausen in Thuringia. It was used for the production of A4 rockets later known as "V-2," or in Russia FAU-2. Nina11’s Grand Uncle Valery Vasilevich Galileev spent two years at the tunnels of this mountain working as an electrician without sunlight or fresh air
Nina11 was inspired to create this workshop by her uncle's story and in commemoration of both of her grandfathers, who were also prisoners during WWII. The face-portraits are created with the belief that by applying oil paint right on the face of the survivors and pressing it straight into the canvases it can release the pain by transferring an unmediated image of their face directly from their flesh. This process took place near the location of Mittelbau-Dora camp between 2013-2015 and is Nina11’s attempt to convey these memories of horror into the future.