2024-04-14 10:50:56
Paljanycja is a homemade Ukrainian bread and currently also the best-selling work of the internationally renowned sculptor Zhanna Kadyrova. She creates the “loaves” from smooth river stones, cut in half into thin “slices”. By selling her palyanycja, the artist supports the Ukrainian army facing Russian aggression.
Stone loaves laid on a white-covered table or tin sculptures made of shrapnel from torn roofs and doors of Ukrainian houses can be seen at the exhibition called Unexpected. It will run until June 30 at the Rudolfinum Gallery in Prague.
That stones can look like bread, which is now really hard in Ukraine, occurred to her in the Carpathian village of Berezova. There, a refugee from the metropolis of Kyiv, Zhanna Kadyrova, according to the Czech transcription Žanna Kadyrovová, took refuge after the start of the Russian invasion in the spring of 2022. She found a small house perched on a steep slope, which she soon turned into a “house of culture”. Four simply furnished rooms became a gallery where she also held film screenings for the villagers.
The artist Zhanna Kadyrova presented the exhibition in Prague personally. | Photo: CTK
“But you can’t take that in your hand, that’s art,” Kadyrova says with amused amazement to the hulk, who begins to rummage through the stone loaves during the village opening. Among the flat edgers, he chooses a suitable sharpener for a folding knife, which he promptly pulls out of his pocket. The scene is captured by a documentary shown at the Rudolfinum right next to the loaves on display. The film approximates the commotion the artist brought to the foothill village.
The short-haired savant found herself in a community of people who had probably never encountered contemporary art. Kadyrova meets them in a store that is also a bar. At the table over a drink, he chats with the locals while drawing their portraits in a sketchbook with quick strokes.
Other shots show her energetically hopping over stones in a wide riverbed that appears to be filled only occasionally by wild mountain water. He and his co-worker Denis Ruban load suitable boulders into a motorized mini-vehicle.
Paljanycja is a homemade Ukrainian bread and currently the best-selling work of Zhanna Kadyrova. | Photo: Ondřej Polák
Later, Kadyrova takes over and cleans the stones, which Ruban then cuts into slices. “Locals helped us get the tools. I ran away from Kyiv lightly. I didn’t think about art at all at that moment,” she recalls.
In front of the camera, he does not appear clueless or perhaps deprived. Činoróde decorates his house before the opening, sets up an improvised table and wooden logs on the grass plot as a place to sit for the audience, which arrives shortly after and refreshes itself with a cup of vodka.
The film documentary intertwines with the exhibited objects, which in Prague are often identical to those on the screen. Embroidered paintings with folklore motifs, a table laid with a palynytsia and next to it a soft Ukrainian melody or shots of the Carpathian polonins: all this brings the viewer an authentic, romantic touch of Ukraine. It is also the most personal part of the exhibition.
Other works are already highly stylized objects of contemporary art. A sample of the handwriting with which Zhanna Kadyrova made her mark on the international scene even before the war. This has now also penetrated into white-glazed objects made of sheet metal and ceramics.
The author has been creating paintings from broken ceramic tiles since 2009 in the series Maps. The new set Shots from 2022 to 2023 features large white tiles broken by a bullet. A cobweb crack with a black center represents a strong and at the same time very creative gesture.
On the wall to the left are works from the cycle Shots, on the ground the cycle Harmless War. | Photo: Ondřej Polák
Minimalist art with a strong anti-war appeal is large bright geometric shapes. A pyramid, cube or sphere made of white painted sheet metal has a torn shell. They were made from parts of roofs and doors of houses destroyed by explosions of Russian ammunition. The author painted them with a thick layer of white. So thick that no one can get hurt by the sharp edges of the torn sheet.
She called the objects Harmless War. “This is a criticism of Europeans, who perceive our war as something safe, distant and abstract,” says the artist, who, on the contrary, finds it strange that exhibitions are still held at all, “while elsewhere people are being killed, cities are being burned and natural resources are being destroyed.”
Detail of the work from the Harmless War series. | Photo: Ondřej Polák
The series of eighteen videos captures a terrifying sight at first glance: a military rocket flying low over the countryside. Above the city, the natural landscape, above the coast. But it doesn’t explode. It’s just a sticker pasted on the window of a moving car or other means of transport, through which the camera looks.
Kadyrova filmed these mystifying videos in various places where she got to with her art. It thus brought a dangerous illusion to the peaceful landscapes of the Western world in particular. The cycle called Russian Rocket has a simple goal: “Simply to share the experience with Ukraine. To remind people in peaceful cities that they live completely differently elsewhere.”
Kadyrova projected a strong relationship with materials and at the same time her need to talk about war into the monumental installation Culture House. In the middle of the noble hall, Rudolfina piled dirt bordered by curbs. In the middle stands a sheet metal structure riddled with explosions and gunfire.
“It was originally a small warehouse in a village that found itself on the front line,” she describes the origin of the structure in which she placed the crystal chandelier. She took it from the destroyed cultural center in Beryslav, a city in the Kherson region, which was occupied until the end of 2022.
The sculptor dedicated the Culture House object to all the destroyed Ukrainian monuments, which she is trying to catalog in her next project.
The final part of the Prague parade belongs to flowers rescued from burnt-out houses and institutions hit by Russian military force. Kadyrova photographs and physically collects them and takes care of the shoots that grew on the burned plants. She turned one of the exhibition halls, Masaryk’s study, into a small jungle of potted plants, surviving witnesses of the war.
Forty-three-year-old Zhanna Kadyrova grew up during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first free years of Ukraine. She is the founder of the Revolutionary Experimental Space group, which strives to cultivate public space and realize its value. She actively performed during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004 and nine years later during the protests on Kyiv’s Maidan. In 2019, she exhibited in the international section of the Venice Biennale, and since then in many other countries.
She was presented in Prague for the first time five years ago by the Zahorian & van Espen gallery, which a year later prepared a second exhibition for her in Bratislava, this time together with Jiří Kovanda.