Born 1973, UK (of Indian origin)

Sankar Nadeson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, public art, and worldbuilding. With studios in Naarm/Melbourne and London, his projects explore how ritual, ceremony, and collective memory shape belonging, identity, and power.

He completed a BA in Painting and Printmaking at RMIT (1996) and a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts (2024). Trained through 28 years of Japanese martial arts and over two decades of research in Masonic Orders, Nadeson investigates symbolic systems and the role of ritual in the identity formation of the “New World.” His approach is guided by an understanding of ritual and myth as living systems carried through both sacred and civic life -what he calls the “inherent story of things.” Raised between Hindu and Christian traditions and informed by Australian Indigenous perspectives, his work is grounded in hybridity and autoethnography.

When his family emigrated from the UK in the early 1980s, Nadeson grew up in Melbourne’s outer northern suburbs, where he first encountered the long roads and horizons of expanding housing estates -landscapes not linked to place but to an aspirational vernacular of the brick veneer home. Among these spaces, and alongside the muscle cars of the 1970s, he became acutely aware of quotidian customs and the vehicle as a dominant icon. These early impressions of suburbia and everyday ritual proved formative.

Foundational to Nadeson’s work is Garland, inspired by a childhood memory of being garlanded in India when received by close family -an act of reverence, respect, and welcome. Reframed in his practice, Garland becomes a civic and cultural system for healing and well-being, a form of cultural stewardship that dissolves boundaries of race and difference into shared belonging. It positions art as social infrastructure, transforming underutilised environments into sites of renewal. Through Garland, Nadeson has embedded art into civic contexts that model community investment and social transformation, collaborating with EastLink ArtLink, the Shrine of Remembrance, RSL Victoria, Legacy, HMAS Cerberus, and Melbourne’s housing developments of the outer west. Garland also extends to natural reserves and sanctuaries, including Winton Wetlands, Yorta Yorta Country, and the Wild Bark Sanctuary on Ngunnawal Country, ACT, where art, community, and ecology are interwoven through practices of social and environmental care, carefully integrated into place.

Alongside this civic strand, Nadeson pursues poetic, autoethnographic research. Through large-scale installations, immersive environments, and performance, he re-stages ritual architectures through game-like checkerboards, Masonic regalia, and ceremonial effigies, reframing them through myth, diasporic memory, and popular culture. Exhibitions such as Lore & Order: In Memoriam of Silver City Lodge No.141 (George Paton Gallery, 2024) and Pavement (Victorian College of the Arts, 2024) demonstrate this mode of inquiry, extending into the recovery of exhumed relics and ceremonial fragments that reveal obscured narratives and hidden architectures of colonial frontiers.

Internationally, Nadeson has advanced Arte Machina and the development of Seidvag-transforming cars into ceremonial effigies embedded within symbolic hierarchies and mythic narratives through the field of worldbuilding. His work broadly examines car culture -its fetishistic behaviours, cult-like environments, and rituals of worship at the heights of “performance” and automotive spectacle. He observes how these icons recall the horse as steed and the ship as arc, vehicles of trade, power, and territorial expansion. For Nadeson, the car becomes a stage where the lore of warriorship intersects with popular culture in a vast psychodrama that entwines contemporary desire with ancient currents, augmented by the sheen and glitz of the new.

In 2018, Nadeson began his collaboration with Koenigsegg on the marque’s arrival in Australia, culminating in the presentation of Jormungundr to founder Christian von Koenigsegg. The following year he exhibited the Sleipner Collection at the unveiling of the Koenigsegg Jesko Attack at the Geneva International Motor Show. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, he presented The Royal Fenris Collection at Geneva with the launch of the Jesko Absolut and Gemera, imparting the moniker Fenris to the world’s first paying Koenigsegg customer. These works form part of Seidvag, his evolving practice that reframes the vehicle as a reliquary of consciousness and devotion, positioning it as an epic protagonist within a new mythic liturgy.

Extending this pathway, in 2021 Nadeson premiered Ägwald at the Ghost Squadron Koenigsegg Tour in Paris. Blending digital world-building, Carnatic vocals, and spatialised sound design, the work invited participants to co-create and inhabit a ritual topography within the psycho-geographies of Ängelholm, Sweden. Here he collaborated with Emeritus Professor Jon Cattapan on Endless Absolut, a digital “skin” for the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut accessible via VR to the marque’s inner circle. This enclosed realm reflects Nadeson’s interest in belief and belonging, situating his work within contemporary worldbuilding discourse, where speculative environments illuminate and unsettle the structures of the “real” world.

In dialogue with Lore & Order and Pavement, Arte Machina entwines the spectacle of automotive culture with the persistence of deep histories, staging both as symbolic systems that ask how rituals of belonging and power endure across time and place. His forthcoming project, developed with Jon Cattapan, Royal Lodge of Fenris in Germany (2025-26), will continue this exploration, creating a speculative Lodge where Norse archetypes are examined as allegories of human desire, frailty, and transcendence.

Nadeson’s work acknowledges that reality is multi-layered -with myth, archetypes, history, and spectacle interwoven -and that art can reveal, obscure, and extend these overlapping dimensions. His works are held in private and civic collections internationally.