Nikita Kadan. Anonymous, Tarred. 2021
Work Description
The sculptural form of Anonymous, Tarred is informed by sculptural exercises, or “volumes”, developed by students of the avant-garde at the VKHUTEMAS workshops in Moscow in 1920, under the guidance of Anton Lavinsky. These volumes represent the legacy of Soviet ideology, a legacy Kadan dramatically comments on by covering the monumental form with black tar, while placing it on a traditional white marble plinth. This blackened volume is the counterpoint to the white Victory. White was as much a shell as it was a utopian expression of ideals, while the gesture of covering the sculpture with black tar, on the other hand, is an act of desecration symbolic to how the politics of memory engages with history and heritage in Ukraine, which simultaneously declares the the death of the Soviet utopia. However, through the act of placing it respectfully on a white marble plinth, the importance of that utopia is preserved as a memory in the face of an implied dystopian future. Anonymous, Tarred, a blackened Soviet legacy, and The Inhabitants of Colosseum, a fascist history, represent two ideologies that defined the 20th century. While the struggle between those two ideologies might have been paused (or came to an end), it emphasizes the binary logic and violence, rather than ideology, that survived and continues to divide the
globe in the 21st century.
- Geldhof, B. Nikita Kadan: Stone Hits Stone. The Past as an Urgent Now // Kadan, N. Stone Hits Stone. — Kyiv: PinchukArtCentre Research Platform, 2021. — 80 p.
