Opening Event: Wednesday 30 July, 6–8pm
Exhibition Dates: 31 July – 28 August

Opening Hours: Mondays 10am–3pm; Thursdays, Saturdays & Sundays 11am–4pm

Nina Sanadze’s Collapsed Utopias – Works Interrupted presents a solo exhibition of sculptures abandoned mid-creation, silenced by the violent rupture of October 7, 2023, and the cruel aftermath. Beyond massacre, a second violence unfolded: Jewish artists cast out, betrayed by their own communities. Her studio erased. Her gallery exiled. Her name silenced. These works are not unfinished but forcibly interrupted. Raw wounds left open by history’s violence.

Born in the Soviet Union and shaped by its muted oppression, Sanadze drew from toppled monuments, icons her family barely survived, to create sculptures that dissect, not glorify. In Melbourne, she placed these alongside the detritus of Western consumerism, discarded polystyrene signs and festival debris, pedestals for fallen idols of a defunct utopia. Stalin slumps in a shopping mall; Lenin collapses into party props. Power here is tired. These works do not rage; they exhale.

Emerging from memory and intuition, they collide histories. One dense with ideological violence, the other hollow and disposable, revealing the surreal poetry of collapse. Referencing Brancusi’s studio, Sanadze freezes her own, suspended mid-gesture on that October day. Marble-like polystyrene mocks permanence, turning monument into fragile theatre prop.

Within this tension lies satire and sorrow. These are sculptural elegies for lost futures, silenced histories, and truths too dangerous to speak. Some pieces became theatre sets, blurring collapse and performance into a dreamlike mise-en-scène where power and illusion dissolve.

No longer shouting from plinths, these sculptures whisper through decay and displacement. Collapse is slow erosion, arriving disguised in the language of virtue and consensus.

We are told socialism was a noble dream corrupted by villains. History says otherwise: erased cultures, crushed dissent, millions silenced in utopia’s name. No reckoning came; the past slipped through history’s fingers, reborn, more dangerous, still righteous.

This exhibition began as a reckoning with the past, but the past is not done with us.

In recent years, Sanadze faced new repression, not from a state, but the cultural sphere, ideological control cloaked in justice, demanding obedience. Her critique became a mirror, and for holding it up, she was exiled by those who once claimed to support her.

This show is both document and defiance, a resurrection on her own terms. Cast out by institutions, Sanadze reclaims her voice in Goldstone Gallery, a space she co-founded for truth-telling.

Presented alongside Chinese dissident artist Badiucao’s solo show opening the following week, Collapsed Utopias – Works Interrupted confront ideological control by governments or cultural gatekeepers. Both live in exile: one literal, one professional. Their work refuses consensus, standing up, speaking out, and showing up, defiant and unflinching.

In a time when dissent is punished and speech policed, Collapsed Utopias – Works Interrupted insists on speaking urgently and without permission.