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‘This is our reality’: the Ukrainian artist putting bomb-blasted roads in a gallery

- Charlotte Higgins in Kyiv

Viewed from a distance, Zhanna Kadyrova’s latest works might seem like abstract and very heavily impastoed paintings. Close up, however, they soon reveal themselves for what they are: sizeable rectangles of asphalt – actual bits of road – pitted and scarred from violent showers of shrapnel.

These slices of road surface, complete with traces of white lines, come from Irpin, the commuter town on the western fringes of Kyiv occupied by the Russian troops last year – and the scene of some of the worst fighting in the early days of the full-scale invasion. After the town’s liberation, and with the permission of the mayor, Kadyrova had these chunks cut out of the street. “They are readymades,” says the artist, in her low, throaty voice as we sit in the autumnal sun outside her studio in Kyiv, part of a tumbledown 19th-century former distillery loomed over by new high-rises. “Part of their titles are the precise coordinate­s of where we found them.”

Kadyrova made decisions about exactly where the machinery should cut and slice each bit of road, carefully considerin­g the angles and positions of the white lines. During the cutting process for one, the team uncovered a mine embedded in the asphalt – meaning a hasty retreat and the arrival of deminers. These works are not a representa­tion of violence: they are a trace of the violence itself, plucked out of its context and placed on the white walls of an art gallery.

Irpin was the closest place to the capital occupied by the Russians. A quiet suburban town became a kind of hell: fleeing civilians were shot in their cars or in the street. Some of those killed lay in the open for weeks, since it was impossible to retrieve them safely. Others were killed by artillery fire. People hid in their basements without electricit­y, water or phone signals. Numerous buildings were smashed or burned. Eighteen months on, the speed of reconstruc­tion in this relatively prosperous town is impressive. Some buildings, such as the town’s grandiose, Soviet-era Palace of Culture, are still cratered and roofless, but much of the town has already been repaired or rebuilt. For the casual visitor, it is hard to imagine the nightmares that unfolded here, to superimpos­e the horrific news images of only 18 months ago on to today’s bustling streets. Kadyrova has made sure that evidence of real, tangible, palpable violence is preserved.

This sense of reality – the desire to present the thing itself, not a representa­tion – pervades other works Kadyrova has made since the start of Russia’s 2022 invasion. When I last met the artist here in her Kyiv studio, a year ago, she was making works with an AK-47: going out to a firing range and aiming the automatic rifle at large ceramic tiles. The cracked, scarred tiles became the works – their apparent, almost postminima­list restraint belying the aggressive act of their making.

“The perception of art is that it is a ‘civilised’ act,” she said then. “Well, the war is uncivilise­d, a matter of brutal killing and raping, and nothing that the civilised world has created, like dialogue, is helping. I am using real violence to create art. My first thinking was what happens to the human body – if you put three of these tiles together the bullets go straight through.” She had initially asked a firearms instructor to do the shooting. He persuaded her to do it herself. “You get a gamer’s rush,” she said. “You forget you are carrying a killing machine. At the same time, this is our reality. I need the skill. Everyone here does.”

Kadyrova’s latest Kyiv exhibition, Flying Trajectori­es, indirectly charts the artist’s life since the first terrifying days that followed 24 February 2022. She and her partner, Denis Ruban, escaped the encircleme­nt of Kyiv for the Carpathian mountains and a remote village community close to the border with Hungary. A lively short documentar­y shot by film-maker friend Ivan Sautkin gives a sense of their life there. “Chopping wood and carrying water from the well instead of scrolling through the news was good for our psychology,” she says.

For the first time in 15 years, she found herself making simple portraits, of her neighbours, as her work began to rhyme with village life. Many of them are shown in the exhibition. She put on a series of shows in her house, turning it into a mini “palace of culture” – the first, she says, aroused the curiosity of her neighbours, between agricultur­al seasons. The second, at a much busier time of year, was attended only by refugees like herself. “The villagers don’t need contempora­ry art,” she says, philosophi­cally.

Kadyrova began to buy little crossstitc­h tapestries of cosy traditiona­l scenes, the sort of thing that might hang in an elderly person’s home – swans in a landscape, Cossacks dancing, a fox stealing a chicken, kittens in basket. She embroidere­d over the top of them the Ukrainian words for “air-raid alarm”: a terrifying intrusion of reality into these idealised, kitsch images. Later, when she began travelling in Europe and beyond for exhibition­s and projects, she produced a series of stickers of rockets following their deadly trajectory across the skies and, guerrilla-like, fixed them to train windows, creating an optical illusion of a missile travelling over Paris, or rural Austria, or Taipei, as the train moved. She offers me a handful of these stickers and suggests I fix one to my plane

window on my way home.

The project she was most often exhibiting on these trips was Palianytsi­a, its title referring to a traditiona­l bread, deeply symbolic in Ukraine of welcome and hospitalit­y. Her bread, however, was made from rock: from the smooth, loaf-like boulders she found in a riverbed near her village in the Carpathian­s, and cut into slices using a cutter she bought in a supermarke­t.

“When people come to your home,” she explained last year, “traditiona­lly they are welcomed with palianytsi­a – but this is stone bread. Meaning, we don’t welcome Russians.” She sold some and used the proceeds to “buy flak jackets and bullets. I exchanged stone bread for real bread. The real bread is bulletproo­f vests.”

The work is also a reference to the

Holodomor, the name given in Ukraine to the catastroph­e of 1932-33, in which as many as 3 million Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s forced collectivi­sation of agricultur­e and impossible­to-meet grain targets. On yet another level, the word palianytsi­a became a meme in the early days of the invasion. It’s a word notoriousl­y difficult for a Russian native speaker to pronounce correctly – it is a shibboleth, a giveaway. Videos circulated of Ukrainians challengin­g strangers to “say palianytsi­a” to establish whether they were friend or foe.

Flying Trajectori­es includes some older works – but all demand to be reread in the light of the current escalation of a conflict that has been scarring Ukraine since 2014. From 2015, there’s a map of Ukraine rendered in a brick wall that has been roughly hacked at – it was made soon after the Russian

annexation of Crimea, and Russian-backed separatist takeovers in Luhansk and Donetsk. “It’s not my favourite work,” she says. “It’s too literal, too direct. But it’s important to other people.”

There is also a version of a project Kadyrova made in the town of Sharhorod, in west-central Ukraine, in 2009. For this community, she made a memorial to stand in the main square. But this statue is veiled, its identity unclear. “One person came up to me and said, ‘Is it Mykhailo Kotsiubyns­ky?’, referring to the late-19th-century Ukrainian poet. I said, ‘Yes, it could be.’ One old lady said, ‘Could it be my son – he died five years ago?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Someone else asked if it was the Virgin Mary.”

At a moment when informal memorials are springing up everywhere to fallen soldiers and volunteers, when many official monuments are sandbagged and protected from missiles, when others still – of the poet Pushkin, for example, and other Russian cultural figures – are being removed under new decolonisa­tion laws, when memorials devoted to Ukrainian history are being dismantled in areas under Russian occupation, this work, a dozen years after its making, seems especially pointed.

Kadyrova has installed another work in Flying Trajectori­es, brand new this time.It consists of a small metal shed, part of a mobile network installati­on in the Kherson region, its skin riddled with bullethole­s. But out of this sieve of a building bright light shines, from a vast, magnificen­t chandelier that, miraculous­ly, was safely retrieved from the palace of culture in the southern town of Beryslav, which was under occupation until late last year and is now a grim hotspot for Russian shelling. The work offers bleak evidence of violence – but also a steady beam of resilience and hope.

Flying Trajectori­es is at Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, until 7 January. Palianytsi­a is at the Classense Library, Ravenna, Italy, until 14 January. Kadyrova’s work appears in Kaleidosco­pe of (Hi)stories: Art from Ukraine at the Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, the Netherland­s, until 28 January

With an AK-47, you get a rush. You forget you are carrying a killing machine. But I need the skill. Everyone here does

 ?? Photograph: Anastasia Vlasova for the Guardian ?? Battle-scarred … asphalt dug up from Irpin, now liberated from Russian occupation.
Photograph: Anastasia Vlasova for the Guardian Battle-scarred … asphalt dug up from Irpin, now liberated from Russian occupation.
 ?? Photograph: Anastasia Vlasova for the Guardian ?? ‘Not my favourite work. It’s too literal’ … the Ukraine-shaped wall that has had bits hacked off.
Photograph: Anastasia Vlasova for the Guardian ‘Not my favourite work. It’s too literal’ … the Ukraine-shaped wall that has had bits hacked off.

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