Nikita Kadan

dioramas in his work. In the 2014 works “Hold the Thought Where the Story Was Interrupted” and “Untitled (Political Natural History Department),” his dioramas are filled with the kinds of items one might expect to find in a small provincial museum. They were created on the basis of media images documenting the destruction of the Natural History Museum in Donetsk during the recent armed struggles and the evacuation of the National Art Museum next to Kyiv’s Independence Square, where the so-called Euromaidan demonstrations began. The stuffed animals, tires and debris in Kadan’s works bring to mind the unrealized idea had by Mikhail Bakunin in 1849 according to which artworks should be used to construct barricades in Dresden. Such an action would have been solidly in the spirit of Kadan, an artist who treats art as a tool of political persuasion as well as resistance. He draws on the history of Ukraine as an observer of political and social processes that are never completely self-contained, instead being based on successive phases of growth and degradation. In one of the artist’s works (“Difficulties of Profanation,” 2015), a display case with rubble and artefacts from the rather recent communist past becomes a greenhouse in which a growing bean plant will, in time, come to cover the destroyed artefacts. The themes that are constantly present in Kadan’s output are war, institutionalized violence, vernacular architecture, ruins, monuments (abandoned, taken over, degraded, etc.), and banners. In his work, the artist makes use of drawing, painting, photography, and film. He also creates installations in public spaces and is a co-founder of the artistic and activist collectives R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and Hudrada. S.C.