National Landscape (House of Services)

2018 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Framed: 150 x 200 cm

Nikita Kadan

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East of Ukraine became a place of armed conflict with Russia-backed separatists, who proclaimed parts of (the) Donetsk and Lughansk oblast (administrative region in Ukrainian) to be ‘People’s republics’. This region, in conflict since spring 2014, is where most of the charcoal is extracted. It is with this same coal that artist Nikita Kadan realizes this drawing in 2018, representing a field on which is juxtaposed a small photograph. It is a 1970 building, a House of Service in Donetsk’s first industrial city of the Donbas region. The gap in scale and the use of different media between photography and coal drawing, confronts a place of authority with natural material resources such as wheat and minerals. These three elements are at the heart of the economic and geopolitical conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, but also involve the rest of the world, especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine in 2014 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. on February 24, 2022. National Landscape is thus the witness of a collective memory of the Ukrainian people.

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Trained in large-scale painting, Nikita Kadan’s artistic practice encompasses installation, graphics, painting, wall drawing, and urban postering, sometimes in collaboration with architects, human rights activists, and sociologists. His practice critically engages with the social, cultural, and political experiences of Ukrainian citizens and their current and past relationships to their former Soviet era. Kadan is a member of a Ukrainian artist collective called R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) since 2004 and founding member of HUDRADA (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective, since 2008.

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Colors:

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• geopolitics.n.01
• trade.n.01
• resource.n.01
• power.n.01
• war.n.01
• violence.n.01