In her quest for spirituality through art, Tatiana Badanina employs a variety of media, including painting, works on paper, light objects, and kinetic installations. Two exhibitions of her work have opened concurrently in Russia: a solo show at the State Institute of Art History in Moscow and a collaborative exhibition with her husband, the artist Vladimir Nasedkin, at the Levashovsky Bread-Baking Plant art centre in St. Petersburg.

One of Tatiana Badanina’s (b. 1955) best-known projects, featured in both exhibitions, is ‘Wings’. The core elements of the installation are a lit, grid-like construction that is reminiscent of an early 20th century flying apparatus accompanied by a looped black-and-white documentary film. It is a collection of archive film footage which records pioneers of aviation testing their clumsy contraptions. Inevitably, each test ends in a crash. “When you watch it, at first you think ‘What are you doing, you idiot? There is going to be a catastrophic failure!’”, the artist told me. “But when you watch them one after another, you see that it was through numerous catastrophes that victory over physical matter was finally possible. Thus, humankind’s dream of flying was realised”.

Badanina’s art is minimalist and almost ascetic. However, if you look closely, you can sense the same mixture of despair and hope hidden beneath the surface. “I am a rather naive symbolist. I use the simplest signs, symbols and colours,” Badanina reflected as she showed me around her Moscow exhibition ‘Heaven’, dedicated to the memory of the late Russian art historian Andrey Tolstoy. She has worked with a few recurring, easily recognizable motifs for many years: wings, angelic white robes, and ladders leading to the sky. “They are all related to heaven and metaphysics in one way or another. These symbols help people to rise and connect with the upper world.” But it is probably this simplicity that makes her message so universal. Her artworks feel equally at home in a museum, under the dome of the former bread-making factory, or inside a Russian Orthodox church. Their spirituality transcends confessional borders: her first light installation, inspired by a journey to Tibet, was paradoxically titled ‘Buddhist Mass in Moscow’. It comprised a row of paper columns reminiscent of pillars in a Buddhist temple. Her ‘White Clothes’ series premiered at the Serafimo-Znamensky Hermitage, a small convent in the Moscow region. The Russian Orthodox Church is wary of contemporary art, and artists who work outside the limits of the centuries-old canon are almost never permitted to exhibit within its walls. Yet some members of the Church have a more tolerant attitude towards it. The convent’s mother superior was among these exceptions. “They understand that art can also be a way to God,” says Badanina.

Like many of her peers in the USSR, she was raised in an atheist family and converted to Christianity during a long personal spiritual journey. The artist vividly remembers her first religious impulses at the age of sixteen, when she saw a golden-rosy ray of sunlight coming from above during a visit to St Isaac’s Cathedral in Leningrad. “At that moment I realised: God exists”. However, in the 1980s, she still regarded the Bible as “a literary work”. Now her entire artistic practice is based on it. “My art is a form of a prayer,” she says. For example, her ‘Ladder to Heaven’ installation features a transparent ladder with two mirrors at the top and bottom, creating the illusion of an endless ascent. The names of Christian virtues are written on each step. Badanina often plays with optical illusions, using them as metaphors for eternity. A ladder or a row of light tubes is reflected in the mirrors and appears to stretch endlessly in both directions. Thus, the visual border between the material and spiritual worlds disappears. Some of her installations reveal an unexpected kinship with the infinity rooms of Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), the otherworldly light-filled spaces of James Turrell (b. 1943), and the meditative neon sculptures of Dan Flavin (1933–1996). “Of course, these artists are geniuses, and perhaps express it more clearly, but they speak the same language,” says Badanina. “Their art is purely metaphysical”.

Badanina was born into a working-class family in Nizhny Tagil, an industrial town in the Ural Mountains. She says that she aspired to become an artist from the age of three. She trained as an artist at the Art and Graphics Faculty of the local Pedagogical Institute. After graduating, she joined the faculty and taught students drawing and composition. It was at the Institute that she met her husband, the artist Vladimir Nasedkin (b. 1954). They have individual artistic practices but often collaborate on projects together. He is renowned for his geometric abstractions, which are often inspired by satellite photographs of Earth, as well as his sculptures and installations. When asked about their collaborative creative process, Badanina describes it metaphorically. “I stand on the ground looking up into the sky, and he is above, looking down from outer space. Our gazes meet somewhere in the middle.” Reality was probably somewhat less romantic. After moving from Nizhny Tagil to Moscow in the 1990s, the artists initially shared a studio but soon realised that they could not work in the same space so Badanina chose to work in their apartment instead. This was one of the reasons why she almost abandoned painting – there just was not enough space for an easel and canvases. However, there were more important creative reasons, too. For years, she reduced the amount of colour in her paintings, essentially limiting her palette to different shades of white. “I tried to make my paintings emit light, by perfecting my glazing technique. Then I realised that I could just use real lights,” she recalls. This idea came to her during a trip to the Himalayas. She brought back some handmade paper from that trip, which she used for ‘Buddhist Mass in Moscow’. In her most popular project, ‘The White Clothes’ she also uses paper and light as her chosen media. The installation is a collection of abstract shapes reminiscent of dress patterns and illuminated from behind. Several iterations of the project have been exhibited at the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, and other venues in different parts of the world, from Venice to rural Niigata province in Japan. These shining, almost immaterial objects seem to float in the air; they are simple yet powerful symbols of purity and fragility. “In my work clothes are always connected to Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and people greeted him as a king by throwing their clothes on the ground in front of him,” says the artist. Although the exhibition ‘Heaven’ is small, it shows this artistic evolution – from 1990s oil paintings made with addition of sand that gives them a raw, earthly texture, to dress-shaped light objects, and finally, to her recent acrylic paintings in which the dress motive recurs. In a series called ‘Palm Sunday’ the ‘sewing patterns’ resemble the floor plans of Christian basilicas with their many columns.

In St.Petersburg, at Badanina and Nasedkin’s exhibition ‘The Observers’, similar objects are suspended in the air high above the heads of the visitors, like celestial beings. Then you see that they are fitted with surveillance cameras which are pointing at the spectators. “Maybe they are angels, or some benevolent entities looking down on us – a reminder that we are not alone, that somebody is watching over and guiding us,” says the artist. In today’s Russia these artworks invariably conjure up images of the omnipresent surveillance systems that ensure you can never escape the digital eye of Big Brother. However, Badanina views the issue in a more philosophical sense. “Artists observe life, nature, and people, and transform these observations into art. Spectators then come to observe this art, while superior beings observe the spectators. We are all both observers and the observed.”.

Nasedkin’s abstract objects are displayed on the floor, works based on aerial photographs of large cargo boats – and act as a metaphor for Noah’s Ark, according to Badanina. Her light objects emit a sense of calm, and even ‘Wings’, with its disturbing archive footage, conveys a message of hope and the promise of flight and freedom. “I am sure that artists create what is lacking in their real lives,” says Badanina. “Everything that happens outside affects my work, naturally, although it is not obvious. It is as if I am working by contrast, trying to reverse the situation”. So, are her ‘Wings’ an instrument of escape from today’s troubled reality? Badanina responds to this question with a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: “When you are drawn to the abyss, you must have wings!”.