ATHEN KARDASHIAN & NINA DURBAN
Crossing the Thames, from North to South I found myself in the studio of Nina Durban and Athen Kardashian, two third generation British-Asian artists. Stepping into their space you’re immediately transported into a room emanating the girlish grit of female adolescence. Floor to ceiling objects of Americanah and Bollywood fill their studio, essentially, it is almost like a reimagining of my teenage bedroom. But don’t let these rather niche references fool you, Athen and Nina’s work is not only cross-cultural, but intergenerational, it speaks to first, second, third, whatever generation.
TASHI How did you begin working together?
NINA So we were talking about a collaboration we could do together. We were actually in my studio, just next door to here, the one that has no windows in it. And we were thinking about making one big board together. And it kind of just—
ATHEN —We realised that as we started talking to each other, you know about we’d been doing for the past few years since our Foundation course at Goldsmiths, we had a mutual liking and respect for each other but had never really hung out. So we did a studio visit, and then quickly went on to talk about our like, experiences, our heritage, and found out like, simple things that we had in common, like both our moms being Indian and our dads being white and our moms being from the same spot in India,
TASHI Where is that?
NINA Both our moms. Well, both our mom’s parents are from Ludhiana, in Punjab.
ATHEN Yeah and actually where my Nani, which is my mom’s mom, is from is a place that doesn’t really exist anymore, because it was on the border of Pakistan in India when it got divided. But yeah, my Nani is from the same place as Nina’s grandparents. They’re all Punjabi Hindus, so we just had lots of similarities with our families.
NINA I think we just had lots of things to catch up on in a way that it just kind of was a conversation that we knew couldn’t really end. It just kind of kept going. It’s completely changed, I think in the last five or six months, what we talk about but what we make has always been really deeply rooted in our conversations.
ATHEN Fully, all our work comes from just the conversations we have in the studio, outside of the studio and over text, like when we see our families, or when we remember something when we see something in our house, and we’re like, “oh, shit, did you have this as well? Did you do that as well?” And obviously, when we first started making the work, we were just so pleased to have met someone who shared so many of the same experiences. And we weren’t sure how that was going to translate to people who weren’t that specific combination of who we are. But through showing the work and sharing it with people, it’s been really interesting talking to other diasporic people and how they have related to the works in terms of like, nostalgia, identity, displacement.
NINA Yeah i think our work has a universality to it.
TASHI Universality in what way?
NINA Universality in a way that we kind of cover a lot of ground between us, because despite our similarities there are a lot of differences.
TASHI Right, so your personal subjectivities influence your work, you’re kind of coming from similar backgrounds with different perspectives that enable more people to connect with your work.
NINA For sure, we have lots of similar experiences, and sometimes very different experiences. Yeah, it's really important to our work, these tensions and things are really important when you're making.
ATHEN But also our work looks very different individually.
NINA Yeah our individual practices before the collaborative practice are very different, and still are now.
ATHEN They always look different, but they're always coming from the same place. So it was really interesting to combine the two together to create a new visual language.
TASHI How does this visual language translate into the future for both of you?
ATHEN Well, we've talked a lot about hanging out and talking with younger artists of the Asian diaspora as well, British Asians specifically. And I think continuing to form a kind of community and a dialogue and just looking out for each other and helping people whether they’re at university or they don’t go to university, just creatives in these situations, because there’s a lot you need to discuss and a lot you need to learn and it’s nice to learn from people who kind of understand your experiences to some extent. And then obviously in terms of work, we just keep working together until we run out of conversations.
NINA But we can both talk for literally forever.
ATHEN Nina actually has already done a lot of her own work in that field, she has done amazing things connecting ex alumni of colour and getting artists to come and talk to the students of colour at her university in Manchester.
NINA Yeah, I put together a crit group of just students of colour from the art school and we used to get a budget, and so I got artists to come and give talks and do crits and then talk to the whole university. That was probably the best thing I got out of University was organising that and creating a community around that.
TASHI That’s amazing, have you kept in conversation with them?
NINA Yeah, yeah. I also work with APR which is A Particular Reality, which is a collective of universities: Goldsmith’s, Middlesex, Manchester and Leeds. So we were part of that at Manchester and then we also helped each other with getting that funding, doing workshops and stuff like that, it's really a great group of people. But I think speaking of the future the main thing for me is creating a community and working out where and who we connect to in the art world.
ATHEN Yeah it’s so alienating, and that’s something we’ve learned by working together. I feel so happy working in collaboration because there’s someone who’s got my back and I’ve got them. That's the scariest thing of whether you’re in university and you don’t relate to many people and you don’t feel particularly seen. Or if you’re not at university, and you have no idea how to go about that, because no one’s ever told you what to do. If you want to be an artist without going to university, it’s super isolated. And it’s isolating enough that if you don’t have the confidence, you’ll just stop. And another thing that we’re both super keen about is not only raising our own confidence, which has happened by being together, but also helping other people gain that confidence and whether they haven’t got that from their education, from their school, from themselves or from their family. Just feeling like they can create and be in these spaces is so important, so important.
TASHI Right and that goes back to what you were saying about forming connections with younger artists.
NINA Yeah I think we have a real like desire for people to feel that they can reach out to us and to have people in the studio. I mean, it's kind of funny because we’ve only been doing this for like a year, but to try and like, have a wider conversation about how to pursue art after university and how to maintain a studio practice in a world where you need to have a lot of money to do that, and how to make it work and how to support your friends who are looking to do that. I'm interested in, like, demystifying that.
ATHEN Yeah just transparency.
TASHI This is so motivating to hear that you are already concerned with doing this despite being in the early stages of creation, because I feel like that’s what people do once they’ve reached a certain level. And then they come back to like, ground level again, and think about community, but it’s important that that’s something you’re like keeping from the beginning,
NINA I mean art is a very collective thing, rather than it being an individual practice that exists without the people around you. Instead, we are so aware of how much the people around us feed into our work.
ATHEN Right it’s important to remember who gave you those ideas and the inspiration, or how your friends can benefit your work or your family. And yeah, as Nina was saying, our work comes easy because it’s made up of literally every single person we know. Like we just put it all together but it’s not really our stuff.
NINA No, no, it isn’t. It’s like a real, almost, family effort. Like it takes all of our friends and family to create them.
NINA So we were talking about a collaboration we could do together. We were actually in my studio, just next door to here, the one that has no windows in it. And we were thinking about making one big board together. And it kind of just—
ATHEN —We realised that as we started talking to each other, you know about we’d been doing for the past few years since our Foundation course at Goldsmiths, we had a mutual liking and respect for each other but had never really hung out. So we did a studio visit, and then quickly went on to talk about our like, experiences, our heritage, and found out like, simple things that we had in common, like both our moms being Indian and our dads being white and our moms being from the same spot in India,
TASHI Where is that?
NINA Both our moms. Well, both our mom’s parents are from Ludhiana, in Punjab.
ATHEN Yeah and actually where my Nani, which is my mom’s mom, is from is a place that doesn’t really exist anymore, because it was on the border of Pakistan in India when it got divided. But yeah, my Nani is from the same place as Nina’s grandparents. They’re all Punjabi Hindus, so we just had lots of similarities with our families.
NINA I think we just had lots of things to catch up on in a way that it just kind of was a conversation that we knew couldn’t really end. It just kind of kept going. It’s completely changed, I think in the last five or six months, what we talk about but what we make has always been really deeply rooted in our conversations.
ATHEN Fully, all our work comes from just the conversations we have in the studio, outside of the studio and over text, like when we see our families, or when we remember something when we see something in our house, and we’re like, “oh, shit, did you have this as well? Did you do that as well?” And obviously, when we first started making the work, we were just so pleased to have met someone who shared so many of the same experiences. And we weren’t sure how that was going to translate to people who weren’t that specific combination of who we are. But through showing the work and sharing it with people, it’s been really interesting talking to other diasporic people and how they have related to the works in terms of like, nostalgia, identity, displacement.
NINA Yeah i think our work has a universality to it.
TASHI Universality in what way?
NINA Universality in a way that we kind of cover a lot of ground between us, because despite our similarities there are a lot of differences.
TASHI Right, so your personal subjectivities influence your work, you’re kind of coming from similar backgrounds with different perspectives that enable more people to connect with your work.
NINA For sure, we have lots of similar experiences, and sometimes very different experiences. Yeah, it's really important to our work, these tensions and things are really important when you're making.
ATHEN But also our work looks very different individually.
NINA Yeah our individual practices before the collaborative practice are very different, and still are now.
ATHEN They always look different, but they're always coming from the same place. So it was really interesting to combine the two together to create a new visual language.
TASHI How does this visual language translate into the future for both of you?
ATHEN Well, we've talked a lot about hanging out and talking with younger artists of the Asian diaspora as well, British Asians specifically. And I think continuing to form a kind of community and a dialogue and just looking out for each other and helping people whether they’re at university or they don’t go to university, just creatives in these situations, because there’s a lot you need to discuss and a lot you need to learn and it’s nice to learn from people who kind of understand your experiences to some extent. And then obviously in terms of work, we just keep working together until we run out of conversations.
NINA But we can both talk for literally forever.
ATHEN Nina actually has already done a lot of her own work in that field, she has done amazing things connecting ex alumni of colour and getting artists to come and talk to the students of colour at her university in Manchester.
NINA Yeah, I put together a crit group of just students of colour from the art school and we used to get a budget, and so I got artists to come and give talks and do crits and then talk to the whole university. That was probably the best thing I got out of University was organising that and creating a community around that.
TASHI That’s amazing, have you kept in conversation with them?
NINA Yeah, yeah. I also work with APR which is A Particular Reality, which is a collective of universities: Goldsmith’s, Middlesex, Manchester and Leeds. So we were part of that at Manchester and then we also helped each other with getting that funding, doing workshops and stuff like that, it's really a great group of people. But I think speaking of the future the main thing for me is creating a community and working out where and who we connect to in the art world.
ATHEN Yeah it’s so alienating, and that’s something we’ve learned by working together. I feel so happy working in collaboration because there’s someone who’s got my back and I’ve got them. That's the scariest thing of whether you’re in university and you don’t relate to many people and you don’t feel particularly seen. Or if you’re not at university, and you have no idea how to go about that, because no one’s ever told you what to do. If you want to be an artist without going to university, it’s super isolated. And it’s isolating enough that if you don’t have the confidence, you’ll just stop. And another thing that we’re both super keen about is not only raising our own confidence, which has happened by being together, but also helping other people gain that confidence and whether they haven’t got that from their education, from their school, from themselves or from their family. Just feeling like they can create and be in these spaces is so important, so important.
TASHI Right and that goes back to what you were saying about forming connections with younger artists.
NINA Yeah I think we have a real like desire for people to feel that they can reach out to us and to have people in the studio. I mean, it's kind of funny because we’ve only been doing this for like a year, but to try and like, have a wider conversation about how to pursue art after university and how to maintain a studio practice in a world where you need to have a lot of money to do that, and how to make it work and how to support your friends who are looking to do that. I'm interested in, like, demystifying that.
ATHEN Yeah just transparency.
TASHI This is so motivating to hear that you are already concerned with doing this despite being in the early stages of creation, because I feel like that’s what people do once they’ve reached a certain level. And then they come back to like, ground level again, and think about community, but it’s important that that’s something you’re like keeping from the beginning,
NINA I mean art is a very collective thing, rather than it being an individual practice that exists without the people around you. Instead, we are so aware of how much the people around us feed into our work.
ATHEN Right it’s important to remember who gave you those ideas and the inspiration, or how your friends can benefit your work or your family. And yeah, as Nina was saying, our work comes easy because it’s made up of literally every single person we know. Like we just put it all together but it’s not really our stuff.
NINA No, no, it isn’t. It’s like a real, almost, family effort. Like it takes all of our friends and family to create them.
TASHI Yeah, where do you actually get all of the memorabilia?
NINA We both have big collections,
ATHEN And we both come from families of hoarders from hoarders.
NINA Yeah, for sure. It’s a very third generation thing and a very Indian thing I think to keep a lot of stuff.
TASHI I can definitely relate to this.
NINA We also do buying trips, we just did one to Southall and I get stuff from family, like from my grandma’s house.
ATHEN And then I guess a lot of things we just have in our houses that we never threw away.
TASHI Yeah. I think it’s something generational as well because I was speaking to my mum about a similar topic and she was saying she didn’t have a lot growing up so now she really treasures what she has and isn’t ready to just throw things once they don;t have a use.
ATHEN But that’s a thing as well as if you have felt displacement before, they’ve done studies that show you’re more likely to kind of hoard or collect; have an obsession with material objects because it makes you feel secure.
NINA And we also always think about homemaking and how objects make a home and how you decorate your home and the importance of being an immigrant woman and what they’ve done to make homes for their families.
ATHEN Yes this is especially true when travelling borders.
NINA I always think about my grandma and how she was working all day and then coming home and making sure the house was a really nice place for her family. Making sure, it felt like home and I think there's a lot of pride in having a house and being able to live in a nice house as an immigrant. I think the collecting or hoarding of objects reflects a real life desire to have a house and be really happy and proud of it.
ATHEN It’s also a sense of pride, like look what I've managed to do,
TASHI Look where I've come from.
NINA Also, when you don’t feel very welcome in many places in the country the home is a place of belonging.
TASHI It's so funny now in the Western world, there is a sense that high culture equates to minimalism, having very little, the Western culture is minimalism it has become so devoid of actual cultural meaning.
ATHEN [Groans] Scandi minimalism.
TASHI We kind of began with thinking about the future, I just wanted to touch on your childhood and growing up in Britain with a mixed identity, because your work has very personal and nostalgic elements.
ATHEN Yeah I just want to quickly say this, that being a mixed person from any background, you never know where you stand or who you are. And I think I really struggled with that growing up to some extent. And this work is really cathartic for me because it is working out our identity for ourselves, and making sense of things from then, but using ideas and experiences from now, to kind of work it out.
NINA Touching on the sense of nostalgia I also think a lot of our work is about buying things you wanted to buy when you’re younger, that you weren’t allowed to, like, you know, revelling, in this kind of girliness that I think a lot of girls are determined to outgrow and leaning into things that are kind of cringy and that you wouldn’t always have admitted to the outside world. It’s like, as a girl, you keep it quite inward and keep it within the bedroom and you keep it within your diary. But I think there’s something really beautiful about making it purposefully public.
ATHEN Yeah, I think that’s why people always share weird shit they did as a kid or like things they collected or funny stories. I guess it’s because that’s what we’re doing is we’re sharing cringy inner thoughts from when we were teenagers. And it’s all kind of lame, but really endearing. Yeah, I think that in itself is a way that people can connect to it. Because it’s unintimidating.
NINA Yeah and I think in the wider British-Asian creative scene there’s a lot of solidarity there. I think a lot of, not so much now, but when I was really early on in my career and at university, I remember all my opportunities, like articles and residencies always came from other British-Asian people. I really found that it feels very supportive.
ATHEN I think it's really cool how there's just so many young British-Asian artists working at the moment and doing amazing stuff. Quite a lot of British-Asian artists are already successful. But that’s not that many considering how many British-Asian people there are and the fact that there’s so many of us now making stuff so there is so much more recognition to come and also a recognition for the previous generations who paved the way!