Zhanna Kadyrova
Ukraine, which has spent the past 30 years in a process of transformation, represents an ideal context for the work of artists intent on bringing to the surface the contradictory energies and layers of a society characterized by rapid change that is affecting nearly all aspects of its social and political order. The reorientation from state socialism towards a Western-style neoliberal economic order leaves behind ruins, while increasingly resurgent nationalism and clericalism are redefining both ideology and monumentality. It is within this highly charged context that Zhanna Kadyrova, as a trained sculptor and a member and initiator of artists’ groups such as R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space),
the punk band Pinoplast, 8=8, The Conquered City, and The City of Winners, works as a fine artist. In an early work, the life-sized figure “Tolya – the Plumber” (2005), the artist contrasts the ideology represented by the Soviet mosaics seen throughout the urban realm with neoliberal prospects—showing not the splendor and glory of labor, but skepticism. Tolya, with his right hand in his pocket, gazing despairingly at his toolbox (and into an uncertain future), stands here as a symbol of the post-Soviet era. The use of mosaics has by now become an iconic feature in the works of Zhanna Kadyrova (as seen in her contributions to the 58th Venice Biennale with its motto of “May You Live in Interesting Times”).
By using and recombining found material, Kadyrova refers to places’ history and reinterprets this historical heritage in her productions, which she also documents on video: abandoned factories and road construction sites provide the material for works such as her asphalt “Data Extraction” series (2011), in which she puts the road surface on the wall as a group of pictures whose title refers to the traces of reality that these pieces of road bear within them. In “Invisible Forms” (2010–12), she injects weight and materiality into ephemeral phenomena such as the beam of light emanating from a surveillance camera. With the objects in the mosaic series entitled “Shots,” she reacts to the events during the Maidan occupation in February 2014, while her biomorphic sculptures “Diamonds” (2014) are an allusion to the accumulation of capital and the oligarchic structures in her country.
A reaction to political iconoclasm and revanchism is the “Monument to a New Monument” (2009), a metaphor for the media construction of new identities in which Kadyrova gives rise to a monumental double entendre. This self-referential symbol embodies a counter-project to the existing monument: a mosaic as a shroud for the actual monument that hence seems as if constantly awaiting the moment of its unveiling. In “Sharhorod,” benches, stones, and lamps set up at Kadyrova’s initiative resulted in a community-building project. And before the backdrop of decommunization (the controversial statutory elimination of communist symbols in public spaces), Kadyrova’s “Recanonization” (2017) ventured an ironic commentary in the city of Vinnytsia, where she applied the golden halo of Christian iconography to Soviet ideological imagery. H.S.
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