WORKS

Nadeschda Barenje

Afternoon Tea
2024-2025

Afternoon Tea

Glass, pewter, spray paint, epoxy

Digging into the roots of ANT (Actor-Network Theory). The pedestal is cast pewter, the stem a medical model of a brain stem turned upside down, the dome a sawn-off repurposed Indian ceremonial bell, split in two.

Flippable plates with inverted patterns, one for rich one for poor. The work questions the rituals of class, the performance of civility, and the hierarchies embedded in domestic objects.

Tea time as a site of both connection and exclusion. The brain stem suggests that our social behaviors are as hardwired as our biology.

2024

Synecdoche of Care

Glass, pewter, PLA, projection, AI

An optimized route across Ostermalm, centered around the Karlaplats fountain, between all the favorite places of my patients in home care, focus: Alzheimer's and dementia. A new topography of mind and memory.

The pewter frame cast from a 3D-printed mold. Silvered glass mirror. Brian Eno's Always Returning plays in the installation.

The work maps care labor onto urban space, making visible the invisible routes of those who tend to the elderly and dying. Each stop on the route holds a memory, a preference, a habit. The mirror reflects both the viewer and the absence of those who are gone.

2024

Innocence Lost / Hard Candy / Cirque de Soleil

Cast glass, porcelain, caramel, hand-sewn circus tent, 3D-printed weapons, video

Glass lollipops shot to pieces with an air pistol. Looping video in a hand-sewn circus tent blown in glass in a welded steel mold.

Inspired by an American teacher's TikTok video: the advice for school shootings is to put lollipops in the box to give children during shootings, a child who is eating cannot scream. The Trangsund shooting. Shootings in Stockholm. I was pregnant during the project, the child is now born.

Porcelain child's head filled with dripping red caramel. 3D-printed disassembled weapons. A "dead" white and pink elephant. Shown at What We Do Not See, Konstfack 2024 (in collaboration with Stockholm Police).

The work refuses to look away from violence against children, using the sweetness of candy and the spectacle of the circus to create unbearable contrast.

Assorted variations
2024-2026

Assorted variations

Glass, mixed media

Tests with abstractions and variations of control through objects and forms. An ongoing series of experiments that don't fit neatly into other projects but inform them all.

Some pieces explore texture, others explore color, others explore the relationship between interior and exterior surfaces. The work is deliberately unfocused, allowing for serendipity and accident.

Not everything needs to be a project. Sometimes making is just making.

2023-2024

Assorted restrictions

Glass, metal, ceramics

Glass is a material where breath can act as a resisting force, and glassblowing can therefore be an act of active presence. One can build or represent a framework that the glass can push against and expand through, or follow.

Forms for a woman: scold's bridle and corset. The glass expands against the framework, bulging through openings, constrained but not contained.

The work explores historical instruments of control applied to women's bodies, translated into the language of hot glass. The breath that inflates the glass is also the breath that was meant to be silenced. Resistance made material.

2021-2024

Love for the game

Glass, copper, ceramics, plaster, projection, silicone, moss

Mixed works from Konstfack and Riksglasskolan. From the turtle with the pearl (if you call nature's glassblower) to silicone (not as highly valued as its shinier cousin silicon dioxide).

This collection spans four years of learning, experimenting, failing, and occasionally succeeding. It includes student work, personal explorations, and pieces that don't belong anywhere else.

The title references both passion and play. Making glass is a game with rules that can be bent but not broken. You play with fire, with gravity, with time. Sometimes you win. Mostly you learn.