Materials: 2 animated paintings, 7 ceramic mushrooms, a costume rack with costumes, and a performance. Variable dimensions

Babushka revolves around connections and kinships. The work weaves threads to other female artists and their works, both as sources of inspiration and as the result of collaborations, bearing witness to how relationships lie at the core of Hannah Amalie Nielsen’s practice. In her dialogue with female artists across history, Nielsen includes not only her mother and grandmother but also the modernists Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hilma af Klint, and Sonia Delaunay. These artists worked with abstract visual languages rooted in painting and textiles, while also engaging in design, advertising, theater, and philosophy. Nielsen explores similar exchanges between painting, animation, sculptural expression, performance, and costume.

One such materialization is a group of ceramic sculptures shaped as mushrooms, created in collaboration with Nielsen’s mother and grandmother. The process surrounding the work encompassed a healing ritual spanning seven generations, both forward and backward in time. The sculptures embody a network of intergenerational care that is essential for all life. Integrated into the work is thus a reflection on what it means to be part of a female community that extends beyond the lifespan of the individual—reaching back to long-deceased foremothers and forward toward yet-unborn girls.

In the same way, Nielsen understands her artistic practice as part of a larger artistic community that transcends time. Babushka is an acknowledgment of, and a tribute to, the artists who have made Nielsen’s own artistic practice possible.