Art Within Reach

Artist / Zhanna Kadyrova

Zhanna Kadyrova was born in Brovary, Ukraine in 1981 and nowadays lives and works in Kyiv. Kadyrova’s long-standing interest in recycling and re-use. She includes in her work remnants, vestiges, or relics of modernist industrial architecture, sites of "material labor" and sites of production, transformed today into places of consumption.

Often appropriating socialist aesthetic norms still visible in contemporary Ukraine, Kadyrova's work is partly inspired by the plasticity and symbolism of urban building materials.

Her objects, which often recycle this "matter of the 20th century", resonate at once as monuments and anti-monuments. They reflect on the consequences of human activities which are often far removed from their initial emancipatory ideals. Film reels, ceramic and synthetic fibers, smalt, and concrete buildings here provide a broader frame for reflection on the wide range of the environmental and social consequences of the materials we invent and use, and the artistic responsibility to engage with these questions.

Tiles, glass, stone, and concrete are among the materials she uses in her work. After carefully exploring Havana and its surroundings, Kadyrova realized that despite the similarities in the history of Soviet Ukraine and Revolutionary Cuba, the island has its unique ethos, which consists of its open-ended historical and socio-cultural dimensions and diverse narratives, which, like the city of Havana, are endlessly woven together.

Among Havana's buildings, Kadyrova was particularly struck by the Joaquín G. Lebreto Anti-Tuberculosis Hospital. Built in 1936, this hospital, which failed to fulfill its function at a particular time due to the major economic crisis that hit Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now a venue for evening gatherings. Kadyrova collected tiles similar to those still used in interiors today and made them into garments - a kind of fabric monument to this important place in Cuban history - where intellectual and revolutionary leader, Rubén Martínez Villena, died. Through this series of works, Second Hand, which began in 2014, Kadyrova also contributes to the biography of Havana's architecture.

Exhibitions

Over the past years, she has held solo exhibitions in Galleria Continua, Havana, and San Gimignano; Bureau for Cultural Translations, Leipzig and the Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria among others. She participated in collective exhibitions at: Garage, Moscow; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Centquatre, Paris; Ukrainian Pavilion, 55th and 56th Venice Biennale; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Polish Institute, Dusseldorf; Saatchi Gallery, London; Architekturzentrum, Vienna; Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt; Zimmerstraße, Berlin; Museum of Moscow, Moscow; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Izolyatsia, Platform for Cultural Initiatives and the Donetsk Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw among others.

In 2019 Kadyrova takes part in the International Exhibition of the 58th Venice Biennale curated by Ralph Rugoff, as well as the Ljubljana Graphic Biennale, curated by Slavs and Tatars.

Awards

She won the Miami Beach Pulse Prize, the Pinchuk ArtCentre Prize in 2011, and, in 2013, the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award.

courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua