Vanished Topography
2026
Stainedglass, Steel
Set in the voids that have remained open since the destruction of St Nikolai’s Church in the Firestorm of 1943, Neda Saeedi’s stained glass installation addresses the tangible apocalypse of the site. Those historical windows once told biblical stories, including scenes from the Apocalypse, known also as a Book of Revelation, understood not only as an end-time vision, but as a search for truth and revelation.
The new scattered forms are inspired by archival research into the bodies of water that surrounded the church, the canals that were filled with rubble after the IIWW and gradually disappeared from view. Traced from old maps, the curves and trajectories of these water ways form the structure of Saeedi’s compositions, made from collected glass shards.
Glass is produced through fire. Sand transformed by heat into something that holds and transmits light. Installed in the emptied windows, the shards function less as memorials and more as lenses, bringing into visibility what has been buried beneath destruction, beneath rebuilding, beneath forgetting. The work acts as a lens through which disappearance becomes visible.
from exhibition text by Joanna Warsza
photos© Daria Kulnina
