For Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, art-making became a compulsive way to process the anxiety of living in a war zone
o look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings is to sense that something is awry, without quite knowing why. A series of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts strange, fantastical scenes that walk a line between Dionysian and dystopic: naked female figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming next to protean, fish-like forms; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.
Back in her home country, she transitioned from part-time painter to full-time artist. “I would try many things to make money, but something I would always just continue to be doing,” she says. “Mentally, it was unavoidable.” Two of the works in the biennale were made in her grandmother’s shed in the rural region of Podillia, where the artist retreated for the first three months of the war, which coincided with spring. One of the paintings shows a sheep and an abstracted figure sowing seeds, under a weeping sun, with a cross in the background – a mix of Christian iconography and mystical symbols that calls to mind the surreal tableaux of William Blake and Marc Chagall.
“I really tried to repeat the way I was working, and the palette, before the invasion. But it wasn’t successful: it was the same paint the same pigments I would usually use, but it was something else, it was very hysterical – even though I was quite happy to be back … only now, looking at these paintings, realising what was happening ,” she reflects.
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