Nikita Kadan’s A New Integrity has just opened at Pavilion 13 in Kyiv. Supported by RIBBON International, it is a multidisciplinary project that brings together sculpture, sound design, theater and oral history to consider the way in which trauma reshapes personal integrity.
At the center of the installation, kinetic sculptures assembled from prosthetic limbs operate like a theater of automatons or temporary avatars for their human users. They perform slow, repetitive movements that follow the rhythms of rehabilitation: repetition, endurance, frustration and adjustment. Nearby, a pair of prosthetic legs runs continuously in mid-air. Suspended in an endless present, their relentless motion reflects the ongoing labour of regaining physical and emotional integrity after injury, while also offering a close view of the prosthetic body’s athletic potential.
“War trauma is a violation of integrity. Ranging from human-anatomical to state-territorial, the physical absence of a limb through war is a manifestation of this violation. What prosthetics allow for is a functional substitution of the limb, giving voice to an absence while also reassembling the body. But equal substitution is impossible in principle. A New Integrity questions what integrity means, whilst also resisting any attempt to reduce a person to a representation of their trauma.” – Nikita Kadan
The public program for A New Integrity will convene art historians, writers, psychologists, artists and veterans to discuss representations of war, injury and rehabilitation in European cultural history, and in contemporary Ukrainian public discourse.
Location: Pavilion 13, Expo Center of Ukraine, 1 Akademika Glushkova Avenue, Kyiv, Ukraine
Exhibition Dates: April 11 - May 31, 2026
