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ARCOmadrid 2024
Voloshyn Gallery, the first ever Ukrainian gallery to participate in ARCOmadrid, is pleased to present a duo project by Ukrainian artists Nikita Kadan and Mykola Ridnyi. This project is a gloomy exploration of the ongoing war in Ukraine. The artists inquire into some historical events that preceded it, at the same time speaking of phenomena outside of its scope. In their works, they link the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s and the establishment of ideologized Soviet culture in the 1960-70s to the current war.
Nikita Kadan and Mykola Ridnyi are among the most prominent members of Ukraine’s art scene. Both artists have twice participated in the Venice Biennale. Nikita Kadan’s works have been displayed at the art institutions like Castello di Rivoli (Rivoli), M HKA (Antwerp), mumok (Vienna), and at the European Parliament. They are included in renowned public collections such as those of Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), M HKA (Antwerp), mumok (Vienna), Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), and Сentre Pompidou (Paris). Mykola Ridnyi’s works have been shown at numerous galleries both in Ukraine and abroad, including Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), daad galerie (Berlin), Transmediale (Berlin), Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (Leipzig), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), and Bonniers konsthall (Stockholm). He has won a number of fellowships, including those offered by the Berlin Academy of Arts, Iaspis (Stockholm), and Gaude Polonia (Krakow).
The project includes both recent works documenting the full-scale war and earlier pieces that examine geopolitical events preceding Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. The artists offer a deep analysis of the meaning, background, and effects of the war.
In his artistic practice, Nikita Kadan consistently explores the themes of conscious personal attitude towards politics and historical responsibility. He shifts an artist’s role from mere esthetic contemplation to initiation of qualitative social change. At ARCOmadrid, Nikita Kadan will present his new works Composition with Three Legs (after Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski), Shadow on the Ground, as well as the Repeating Speech series. All of these were created after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The artist started working on them on February 24, 2022 in Voloshyn Gallery, where he had been staying for some time hiding from missile attacks.
The gallery is located in Kyiv’s cultural and historical center, on Tereshchenkivska Street, in a historical building formerly owned by a renowned entrepreneur and philanthropist N.A. Tereshchenko. It is a six-story edifice with a semi-basement and a basement. During World War II, the semi-basement has been used as a bomb shelter. When the current invasion broke out, Voloshyn Gallery sheltered in the building its staff and several artists, including Nikita Kadan. Here, on the first day of the full-scale war, he started working on his new project.
During the days that followed, switching between organizing projects with his peers and taking to the press, the artist began his series of eloquent slogans against Russia’s assault entitled Repeating Speech. Among other works, it includes a banner reading “FUCK WAR”, which initially hung on the facade of the Secession gallery in Vienna. It is one of Kadan’s many viral gestures aimed at denouncing the war.
At that same time, he began working on a series of drawings titled The Shadow on the Ground. Each of those depicts plowed black soil with a human figure, a shadowy silhouette overlapping it. Soil absorbs bodies, and everything left behind is a shadow on its surface. It cannot be hidden or erased. The motif of a plowed black field refers to hundreds of photos showing corpses partly covered by soil, explosion craters produced by missiles and bombs, and mass graves hurriedly dug on the outskirts of cities and villages. Images of these kinds gained wide circulation in social and mass media during the war period. Another motif present in the drawings is that of the “rich Ukrainian soil”, central for both colonial and nationalist narratives about Ukraine’s “global mission”.
Along with these pieces, Voloshyn Gallery presents Kadan’s earlier works from the Broken Pole series. In it, the artist examines the avant-garde legacy (particularly the works by the artist Vasyl Yermilov), reimagining it with a contemporary flair. The series brings together tar-covered metal shields and silkscreen prints of photographs of buildings destroyed during the hostilities in Donbas after 2014.
"These are photos I took in 2015 and photos of lost avant-garde works by Vasyl Yermilov. This is, in fact, a black hole that sucks up history of art, history in general, and modernity," Nikita Kadan says.
Today, Donbas has become a place where history is being replaced with ideological myth-making and military propaganda. This area is a place of rich historical memory. It is associated with the workers’ revolutionary movement in the early 20th century. It was also the local center of two stages of industrial modernization: the pre-revolutionary, characterized by the presence of European capital and cheap local labor under police supervision in the Russian Empire, and the post-revolutionary, i.e. the 30s wave of early Soviet labor enthusiasm and Stalinist repressive coercion. Moreover, it holds recollections of the development of social infrastructure and industry after the World War II and their collapse during the post-Soviet period.
Engaged in a dialogue with Kadan’s works is the series of minimalistic yet eloquent sculptures by Mykola Ridnyi entitled More Flags, evacuated from Kharkiv in the spring of last year.
Ridnyi works across different media ranging from early collective actions in public space to the amalgam of site-specific installations, sculpture, photography, and moving images. This combination constitutes the current focus of his practice. In a number of works created within the last several years, Ridnyi explores the theme of vision in the context of reality affected by political catastrophes and war. How do we talk about violence without reproducing it? How do we stay compassionate amidst a flow of sensational news and shocking content?
The sculptures included in the series reproduce various shapes of government buildings, marketplaces, apartment blocks, and transport facilities. All of them share a common detail, namely the presence of a flag. This series was initially meant as an inquiry into the symbolic purpose of flags as ideological markers of territory. In times of war, a flag assumes ambivalent meanings ranging from a symbol of solidarity, national identification, and safety to that of occupation and direct threat. Seen from the military perspective, facilities marked with a flag are often potential targets. Black paint covering the sculptures erases any linkage to the original architectural context and provokes associations with burned city landscapes. Forms shaped in a rough expressionist manner symbolize damages that Ukraine’s urban infrastructure suffered due to the Russian attacks.
ARCOmadrid 2023
22 - 26 February 2023
Вooth 7A18
Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Danylo Halkin at ARCOmadrid 2024.
Ukrainian artist Danylo Halkin, born in the city of Dnipro, explores the concept of public space and reflects on the influence of political systems on people's lives. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territory, he initiated a project focused on the study of Soviet decorative art, with particular emphasis on the stained glass windows of hospitals, military offices, and fire stations, thus creating a cohesive artistic expression in the context of wartime.
The title Optical Prostheses refers to the distortion of history through the prism of Kremlin propaganda and Russian imperialism. The narratives conveyed by the stained glass windows have always been propaganda tools; in the past they promised a bright and happy tomorrow, but the war has upended our perception of them, reversing the effect. Now they depict war crimes, sometimes literally visualizing headlines from Ukraine.
Like many other objects of decorative and applied art, stained glass windows are disappearing fast: they can be removed - under the 2015 decommunization law - destroyed, or looted by developers. They are also at risk of being destroyed in Russian bombing raids. Objects that should have cultural heritage status can still be purchased on free classified portals and online auctions. The series of stained glass windows presented in the exhibition, framed in a light box system, was purchased this way and, according to the seller, once adorned a restaurant in the Sosnowy Bór sanatorium in the village of Vlasovka in the Poltava region. By transferring the stained glass to the exhibition space, Halkin points to the need to preserve the cultural heritage of the second half of the 20th century and protect it by giving it museum status. Moreover, in the exhibition space, these objects no longer function as elements of industrial design, but as independent objects that evoke the carefree life before the war.
The paintings in the Optical Prostheses series depict smoke-darkened stained glass windows of real buildings in the Dnipropetrovsk region, either damaged by Russian rocket attacks or shattered in the process of removing communist symbolism in Ukraine. The absence of colors other than black and white makes the works resemble monochrome illustrations from Soviet art history books. Yet they also speak of war news and cultural heritage. The artist paints images of stained glass onto the canvases, giving them a new meaning and a status as a work of art that they never had before. In a way, the resulting pieces capture the spirit of today while allowing the viewer to glimpse the atmosphere of the original environment of the stained glass windows.
This brings to mind apt and appropriate words from Walter Benjamin's essay On the Concept of History: "To articulate the past historically is not to recognize it 'as it really was.' It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger." By turning to the artistic legacy of the past, Halkin interweaves threads of history with the gruesome reality of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Emphasizing the importance of challenging official narratives, he allows Soviet totalitarian art to reveal its essence in a different light.
About Danylo Halkin
Danylo Halkin (born in Dnipro in 1985) is a contemporary Ukrainian artist/curator. He had studied at Dnipropetrovsk Theatre and Arts College and at Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture. In his works, he explores the concept of public space through installations, happenings, site-specific art, etc. He cooperates with state-owned cultural institutions, drawing public attention to pieces of Soviet heritage in Eastern Europe to promote their further preservation in museums and re-interpretation.
Halkin’s works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions, including Kaleidoscope of (Hi)stories. Ukrainian Art 1912–2023 (The Albertinum, Dresden), Out Loud (Galeria Labirynt, Lublin), When Faith Moves Mountains (PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv), Transition Dialogue Talks (LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster), Europa Endlos (Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen), National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kyiv) and others.
He is a two-time nominee for PinchukArtCentre Prize (in 2011 and 2015) and the winner of the Special Prize of the award (in 2013). Halkin was shortlisted for Malevich Award (in 2014) and M17 Sculpture Prize (in 2020). He also won the Special Prize of the Art Future Prize award in 2020.
About Voloshyn Gallery
Established in October 2016 by Max and Julia Voloshyn, Voloshyn Gallery specializes in contemporary art. It exhibits a broad range of works in a variety of media, hosting solo and group exhibitions and taking part in leading contemporary art fairs. Over the last two years, the gallery has participated in The Armory Show, Liste Basel, ARCOmadrid, Art Brussels, Art Cologne, Enter Art Fair, viennacontemporary, Dallas Art Fair, NADA Miami, Untitled Art, Art Athina, EXPO Chicago, and more. Voloshyn Gallery is a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). In 2023, Voloshyn Gallery opened its new space in Miami, FL, US.
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