Nadia Sablin
Years Like Water
Sep 4 - 27 , 2025
Years Like Water is a decade-long look at a small Russian village, its inhabitants, ramshackle institutions, nature, and mythology. The exhibit loosely follows the families of two classmates –Katya Vysotskaya and Vika Ivanova – the children growing up unsupervised in a magical wilderness, as the adults struggle for survival. The project deepens the artist’s connection to these villagers: they share memories of a childhood spent on this land and a love for storytelling. Just as fairy tales, the stories encountered here reveal a dangerous place for girls and women, where flashes of beauty and freedom are brief and costly, and where multiple generations have survived neglect and abuse. As Russia has once again become opaque to our Western understanding, this project is a document of a pre-war time, interweaving beauty, poverty, trauma, and hope.
In-Person Artist Talk
Sat, Sep 20 at 2 PM
Nadia Sablin (Russian, b. 1980, she/her) is a photographer, whose work explores the larger world through intimately observed narratives, memory, fact, and myth. Her long-term projects span years of children growing up, elders growing old and the ways in which people cope with the passage of time in an unstable environment.
Sablin is a Guggenheim fellow and Fulbright scholar, winner of the Center for Documentary Studies Honickman prize and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in photography. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, American Photo, and The Washington Post and exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including Philadelphia Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Cleveland Museum of Art among many others.