Nikita Kadan. The Inhabitants of Colosseum. 2018. Sound sculpture
Work Description
The subject of political violence, embedded in binary world views, moves us through the exhibition, both in direct and indirect ways. A key work for this is The Inhabitants of Colosseum (2018). The work appears first as a sound piece at the start of the exhibition but is not named or explained until the very end of the exhibition where it returns in a different form. As a sound piece, one hears the sound of 400 pairs of wooden clogs walking together over a stone bridge (the work at the start of the exhibition has no caption nor any textual reference). The sound itself is a remnant of a 2018 performance in Regensburg, which took the form of a call to public action by Nikita Kadan in remembrance of over 400 prisoners, who were stationed at the Colosseum boarding house, a satellite of the Flossenburg concentration camp between March 19 and April 24th, 1945. During their internment, the prisoners were forced to repair damaged railway connections, marching daily from the camp over the stone bridge in Regensburg to the railway worksite, wearing wooden clogs. Over a period of 5 weeks, a tenth of the prisoners died.
Stone Hits Stone, exhibition view, 2021, PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv
Stone Hits Stone, exhibition view, 2021, PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv
Stone Hits Stone, exhibition view, 2021, PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv
The choice to leave this sound work unnamed and unexplained at the start of the exhibition allows for the installation to move beyond its original intent, becoming duplicitous. The deliberate manipulation invites an initial reading of the work within the context of the first spaces and works the viewer encounters, with suggestions of Marxist ideals, revolutions and farmers’ resistance. The fascist narrative, inherent to the work’s original meaning, is only revealed at the very end of the exhibition, complicating the encounters that followed the first display of The Inhabitants of Colosseum. This confusion obliges the viewer to revisit the preceding works and rethink the implications of fascist history and ideology, in relation to both Ukrainian historical narratives and contemporary challenges within Ukraine and in a global context.
- 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.
