“What can I do against a tank, with my art? Nothing…”. When the Russian army invaded Ukraine, Zhanna Kadyrova felt useless. But the 42-year-old artist changed her mind when galleries around the world snapped up her war-inspired works, enabling her to raise funds to help soldiers and civilians in Ukraine.
Evacuated to the rural west of the country, far from her workshop and her tools, Zhanna Khadirova chose to use stones polished by the water of a river which she staged to create a work inspired by loaves of traditional Ukrainian bread. A project conceived “in a few seconds”, which has earned him a place in some forty exhibitions around the world.
Read the fileArtists facing the war in Ukraine
“I have just come back from India, I have already been to Thailand, Taiwan, America, Europe,” detailed Zhanna Kadyrova. “After that, of course, I no longer felt any disappointment with art.” Because the profits from the works were used to finance the delivery of aid to the front, to support the soldiers and also the artists. And Zhanna Kadyrova is happy to use these funds to help the victims: “I have never earned so much money. And all of it was used to help people.
A gallery in Kiev is currently exhibiting a series of her works which she has baptized “Anxiety”: tapestries representing flowers and kitsch cats, on which she embroiders warning messages of air raids. These works represent “the opposite of war”, she underlines. “When I add the inscription air alert I get a contrast. This is our reality.” In front of the National Opera in central kyiv, a wall made of bullet casings bears the printed image of a ballerina doing pointe. “I think it’s important to remind people that there is still a war going on,” says Nadiya, a passerby who takes pictures of the work. To create this work, the Ecuadorian Felipe Jacome photographed his collaborator Svitlana Onipko, a Ukrainian ballerina now living in the Netherlands, using a 3D printer to transfer her image onto bullet casings mounted in resin. The sale of reduced versions of this work has raised funds for war orphans and equipment for the troops on the front, allowing to collect “more than 50,000 dollars”, according to Felipe Jacome. He wants to exhibit this work in Europe and the United States so that we don’t forget what is happening in Ukraine.
Nearby, at the Pinchuk Art Center gallery in Kiev, 21-year-old Maksym Khodak views the work she made with two well-known TikTokers who agreed to accompany her to the eastern city of Kharkiv , war-torn. They spent several days there in October, under the bombs. The TikTokeurs, Roman and Viktoriya, come from western Ukraine and had never experienced such violent fights. “You become paranoid that you risk being bombarded, even lying in bed,” laments Roman. The video montage they created is displayed simultaneously on three separate screens. We see memes, such as former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson dancing with a lightsaber or games in which Russian “orcs” are targeted, in reference to the evil and cruel creatures who constitute the army of darkness. in the universe of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. “I wanted to think about what the new political language could be, that is, the way to speak to my generation,” said Mr. Khodak, who encourages young bloggers to do the same, inventing their way to talk about Ukraine to their generation. Roman thus compares Russia in its relationship to Ukraine as “a toxic ex” who “shots” you. “We don’t want anything to do with the past anymore,” he concludes.
