Origin Stories
National Nordic Museum
June 21–October 26, 2025
Seattle, WA
Nina Katchadourian’s Origin Stories threads through Seattle’s National Nordic Museum with five projects that explore family and memory, play and reenactment.
If you’re a good museum visitor and do things in order (which is an extended joke and conflict in much of Katchadourian’s work), you first visit her 2021 epic To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World—epic on many levels. To enter it, you jump into the deep end of a deep blue and dense installation, as well as scan a QR code linking you to over two hours of audio that form the backbone of the project (well worth every second). The artist created the work during the pandemic in response to Survive the Savage Sea, a book written by Dougal Robertson, a farmer-cum-sailor who, along with his family, survived a 1972 killer whale attack that left them adrift in the Pacific for thirty-eight days.
The installation goes day-by-day with scale renderings of fish, turtles, and whales, small toys or fruit or candy, a cup of coffee, drawings, wire sculptures, and remakes of significant tools in the story. These are paired with wall texts listing relevant audio clips. The objects range from metaphorical (Lindt chocolates as fish eyeballs), to indexical (a scale map of Robertson’s salvational dinghy on the floor) to recreations of artifacts. The recreations are the funniest and would satisfy even the most photorealistic props master: during the journey, sea turtle oil turned out to be a cure-all, and Katchadourian remakes the sailors’ stash with sunflower oil in an exact replica of the original bottle.
The room is strongly reminiscent of an exhibit in a children’s museum, and creates a similar inquisitive distance from a harrowing topic (any parent who’s seen a four-year-old learn about climate change in a cheery exhibition will recognize this strangeness). In contrast, listening to the seventy-one-track conversation is like bingeing perfect television. The artist’s conversation with Douglas Robertson is immersive and emotional; where the life-sized dorado drawing asks for curiosity, Robertson’s retelling of the tense minutes spent spearing it and watching it die asks for your soul.
On her decades-long obsession with the story Katchadourian muses:
There’s this kind of ceaseless invention—the problem solving with a lot at stake requires these creative solutions to things… I’ve thought about this with certain artistic projects of my own, that it takes a kind of optimism, I think, to look around the world and say, “You know what, there is something here, it’s not all a lost cause.”
The Nordic Museum’s home in Ballard, a formerly working class, historically Scandinavian maritime neighborhood (now gentrified) connects neatly with both Nordic and sea-faring topics in the artist’s work. The artist’s Finland-Swedish maternal heritage is mentioned in the curatorial statement. And there is a melancholy and enduring homesickness in this part of Seattle that I feel Origin Stories honors. Behind the museum runs the Ship Canal, and a block away you can sail through the Ballard Locks to the cold waters of the Puget Sound. They’re scenic, but full of human trouble: there are sailboats and ferries of course, but also massive Chinese tankers, nuclear submarines, and the memories of all sailors and shipwrights who never made it back ashore. The curators point out that only a few blocks away, one can contemplate the monument to fishermen lost at sea.