The Radial Bone

Voloshyn Gallery is pleased to present The Radial Bone, a solo show by Nikita Kadan on view at the gallery’s Miami location.

 

The Radial Bone exhibition structure is arranged around the central image of a sharp and shiny ray which violently pierces the body, penetrates the soil and various inhabited environments. This ray symbolically stands for the destructive human desire, the right of the ‘strong-willed’ ones to colonize, extract and consume. Any war of the human world is also a war against non-human species. Every war is also an ecocide - and the Russian war in Ukraine is no exception.

 

And this war brings to life the shadows of empires and "historical nations”, willing to colonize and to bring to submission those forms of life, they label as "non-historical". For centuries, both in Russian and Western historiography, Ukraine was considered rather just as a "territory" with fertile lands, and its inhabitants - as ones deprived of any real historical agency. They were looked at either as “natural born agrarians" who needed patronage, or simply as an addition to the landscape to be colonized, subjugated and used for the benefit of the powerful ones.

 

In the work that gave the title to the whole exhibition, the Radial bone or Radius (literally the 'Ray bone' in Ukrainian*) is extended with a shiny metal ‘ray’. Similarly, the handles of old Ukrainian agricultural tools extended with the “rays”, likely turning into the weapons. It is worth mentioning that despite the centuries of colonial oppression, Ukraine became the place of numerous peasant uprisings.

 

Other motifs in the painting and graphic works of the exhibition - an ears of wheat and the ribbons from the Ukrainian Soviet coat of arms, a crater from an explosion with a face-mask at the bottom, animals in flames - in one way or another refer to questions about the human’s "right of the strong one" in relation to the non-human world, and about the understanding of these questions by those who had a long-lasting historical experience of being dehumanized.

 

*The word radius is Latin for "ray". The radius is named so because the radius (bone) acts like the radius (of a circle).

 

 

Opening Reception: December 1, 2024, 6-8 PM

Dates: December 1, 2024 - January 25, 2025

Art Week Gallery Hours: Sunday Dec 1st - Saturday Dec 7th, 11 am - 5 pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am - 5 pm

Location: 802 NW 22nd St, Miami, FL 33127