Nikita Kadan: Limits of Responsability
Nikita Kadan‘s (b. 1982, Ukraine) Limits of Responsability is on display until the 17th of January at Galerie Champagne-Premier in Berlin.
The foundation for Nikita Kadan‘s body of works is a series of color slides by the Ukrainian artist. They document the protests against the scheduled removal of the protesters’ camp on Independence Square in Kiev in the spring of 2014. In the series, the focus is on the Maidan gardens that activists planted around their tents and barricades during their months of occupation, cultivating vegetables, grains and herbs in the contested Kiev ground. They cultivated the occupied area to survive, to sustain themselves self-sufficiently, while simultaneously carrying out their resistance, highlighting their presence, and literally rooting their claim deep in the earth of Maidan. Cabbage and lettuce, onions and tomatoes grow and ripen amongst the monuments, improvised homesteads, flags and barricades. A garden stretches its fingers between the instruments of protest, a slice of domesticated nature. Nature, where metamorphosis and the potential for change have always been inscribed, grows in the gardens of Maidan in safe, orderly, labeled rows, marking the square as a habitat and its very earth as taken and occupied.
In this multimedia exhibition the observer encounters not only various forms of resistance, conquest and occupation, but also various strategies of visual representation and argumentation. The aesthetics of the exhibited color slides are reminiscent of those found within the mass-media system of social media platforms, of viral snapshots that circle the globe, inspiring and agitating. Nikita Kadan’s watercolors, on the other hand, call to mind academic textbooks of biology or anatomy. But where such textbook illustrations present idealized details of one organic object, Kadan’s works combine plant bodies with human ones, and nature with architecture. Roots, tubers and buds end in bones or melt into architectural elements. Things that do not naturally connect gradually dissolve into one another, their unions creating new entities.
Kadan‘s Limits of Responsibility is not a rejection of the image, but an exploration of its conditions. In his choice of motif, in his aesthetic examinations of media and material, the artist reveals ideologically potent and system-strengthening image strategies, makes them his own, decontextualizes and undermines them. Reference and transmission unmask the original, making it recognizable for what it is.
