Viewed from a distance, Zhanna Kadyrova’s latest works might seem like abstract and very heavily impastoed paintings. Close up, however, they soon reveal themselves for what they are: sizeable rectangles of asphalt – actual bits of road – pitted and scarred from violent showers of shrapnel.
These slices of road surface, complete with traces of white lines, come from Irpin, the commuter town on the western fringes of Kyiv occupied by the Russian troops last year – and the scene of some of the worst fighting in the early days of the full-scale invasion. After the town’s liberation, and with the permission of the mayor, Kadyrova had these chunks cut out of the street. “They are readymades,” says the artist, in her low, throaty voice as we sit in the autumnal sun outside her studio in Kyiv, part of a tumbledown 19th-century former distillery loomed over by new high-rises. “Part of their titles are the precise coordinates of where we found them.”
Kadyrova made decisions about exactly where the machinery should cut and slice each bit of road, carefully considering the angles and positions of the white lines. During the cutting process for one, the team uncovered a mine embedded in the asphalt – meaning a hasty retreat and the arrival of de-miners. These works are not a representation of violence: they are a trace of the violence itself, plucked out of its context and placed on the white walls of an art gallery.
Irpin was the closest place to the capital occupied by the Russians. A quiet suburban town became a kind of hell: fleeing civilians were shot in their cars or in the street. Some of those killed lay in the open for weeks, since it was impossible to retrieve them safely. Others were killed by artillery fire. People hid in their basements without electricity, water or phone signals. Numerous buildings were smashed or burned. Eighteen months on, the speed of reconstruction in this relatively prosperous town is impressive. Some buildings, such as the town’s grandiose, Soviet-era Palace of Culture, are still cratered and roofless, but much of the town has already been repaired or rebuilt. For the casual visitor, it is hard to imagine the nightmares that unfolded here, to superimpose the horrific news images of only 18 months ago on to today’s bustling streets. Kadyrova has made sure that evidence of real, tangible, palpable violence is preserved.
This sense of reality – the desire to present the thing itself, not a representation – pervades other works Kadyrova has made since the start of Russia’s 2022 invasion. When I last met the artist here in her Kyiv studio, a year ago, she was making works with an AK-47: going out to a firing range and aiming the automatic rifle at large ceramic tiles. The cracked, scarred tiles became the works – their apparent, almost post-minimalist restraint belying the aggressive act of their making.
“The perception of art is that it is a ‘civilised’ act,” she said then. “Well, the war is uncivilised, a matter of brutal killing and raping, and nothing that the civilised world has created, like dialogue, is helping. I am using real violence to create art. My first thinking was what happens to the human body – if you put three of these tiles together the bullets go straight through.” She had initially asked a firearms instructor to do the shooting. He persuaded her to do it herself. “You get a gamer’s rush,” she said. “You forget you are carrying a killing machine. At the same time, this is our reality. I need the skill. Everyone here does.”
Kadyrova’s latest Kyiv exhibition, Flying Trajectories, indirectly charts the artist’s life since the first terrifying days that followed 24 February 2022. She and her partner, Denis Ruban, escaped the encirclement of Kyiv for the Carpathian mountains and a remote village community close to the border with Hungary. A lively short documentary shot by film-maker friend Ivan Sautkin gives a sense of their life there. “Chopping wood and carrying water from the well instead of scrolling through the news was good for our psychology,” she says.
For the first time in 15 years, she found herself making simple portraits, of her neighbours, as her work began to rhyme with village life. Many of them are shown in the exhibition. She put on a series of shows in her house, turning it into a mini “palace of culture” – the first, she says, aroused the curiosity of her neighbours, between agricultural seasons. The second, at a much busier time of year, was attended only by refugees like herself. “The villagers don’t need contemporary art,” she says, philosophically.
Kadyrova began to buy little cross-stitch tapestries of cosy traditional scenes, the sort of thing that might hang in an elderly person’s home – swans in a landscape, Cossacks dancing, a fox stealing a chicken, kittens in basket. She embroidered over the top of them the Ukrainian words for “air-raid alarm”: a terrifying intrusion of reality into these idealised, kitsch images. Later, when she began travelling in Europe and beyond for exhibitions and projects, she produced a series of stickers of rockets following their deadly trajectory across the skies and, guerrilla-like, fixed them to train windows, creating an optical illusion of a missile travelling over Paris, or rural Austria, or Taipei, as the train moved. She offers me a handful of these stickers and suggests I fix one to my plane window on my way home.
The project she was most often exhibiting on these trips was Palianytsia, its title referring to a traditional bread, deeply symbolic in Ukraine of welcome and hospitality. Her bread, however, was made from rock: from the smooth, loaf-like boulders she found in a riverbed near her village in the Carpathians, and cut into slices using a cutter she bought in a supermarket.
“When people come to your home,” she explained last year, “traditionally they are welcomed with palianytsia – but this is stone bread. Meaning, we don’t welcome Russians.” She sold some and used the proceeds to “buy flak jackets and bullets. I exchanged stone bread for real bread. The real bread is bullet-proof vests.”
The work is also a reference to the Holodomor, the name given in Ukraine to the catastrophe of 1932-33, in which as many as 3 million Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture and impossible-to-meet grain targets. On yet another level, the word palianytsia became a meme in the early days of the invasion. It’s a word notoriously difficult for a Russian native speaker to pronounce correctly – it is a shibboleth, a giveaway. Videos circulated of Ukrainians challenging strangers to “say palianytsia” to establish whether they were friend or foe.
Flying Trajectories includes some older works – but all demand to be reread in the light of the current escalation of a conflict that has been scarring Ukraine since 2014. From 2015, there’s a map of Ukraine rendered in a brick wall that has been roughly hacked at – it was made soon after the Russian annexation of Crimea, and Russian-backed separatist takeovers in Luhansk and Donetsk. “It’s not my favourite work,” she says. “It’s too literal, too direct. But it’s important to other people.”
There is also a version of a project Kadyrova made in the town of Sharhorod, in west-central Ukraine, in 2009. For this community, she made a memorial to stand in the main square. But this statue is veiled, its identity unclear. “One person came up to me and said, ‘Is it Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky?’, referring to the late-19th-century Ukrainian poet. I said, ‘Yes, it could be.’ One old lady said, ‘Could it be my son – he died five years ago?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Someone else asked if it was the Virgin Mary.”
At a moment when informal memorials are springing up everywhere to fallen soldiers and volunteers, when many official monuments are sandbagged and protected from missiles, when others still – of the poet Pushkin, for example, and other Russian cultural figures – are being removed under new decolonisation laws, when memorials devoted to Ukrainian history are being dismantled in areas under Russian occupation, this work, a dozen years after its making, seems especially pointed.
Kadyrova has installed another work in Flying Trajectories, brand new this time.It consists of a small metal shed, part of a mobile network installation in the Kherson region, its skin riddled with bulletholes. But out of this sieve of a building bright light shines, from a vast, magnificent chandelier that, miraculously, was safely retrieved from the palace of culture in the southern town of Beryslav, which was under occupation until late last year and is now a grim hotspot for Russian shelling. The work offers bleak evidence of violence – but also a steady beam of resilience and hope.
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Flying Trajectories is at Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, until 7 January. Palianytsia is at the Classense Library, Ravenna, Italy, until 14 January. Kadyrova’s work appears in Kaleidoscope of (Hi)stories: Art from Ukraine at the Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, the Netherlands, until 28 January
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