Betreff: REVIEW: Xenia Benivolski on Nikita Kadan’s “Victory over the
Sun” at François Ghebaly, New York
Datum: Tue, 06 Dec 2022 22:01:14 +0000
Von: art-agenda <art-age...@mailer.e-flux.com>
Nikita Kadan’s “Victory over the Sun”
by Xenia Benivolski
François Ghebaly, New York
The 1913 opera /Victory over the Sun /describes an attempt to capture
the sun in order to overthrow linear time and reason. The work ushered
in artistic traditions that came to shape Soviet Futurism: it’s where
Malevich’s black square, for instance, made its first appearance (on a
set curtain). Nikita Kadan’s exhibition, which takes its title from the
opera, is anchored by a wall-hanging neon sculpture entitled /Private
Sun /(2022) which refers to a classic of Soviet-era design: a window
grate, ubiquitous in large apartment buildings, with bars like the
rising sun. Where the avant-garde original advocated for the destruction
of the present to clear a path for the new, the Ukrainian artist’s use
of the architectural feature suggests a darker notion: of being held
captive in someone else’s idea of the future.
Hanging in the main space of the gallery is a series of charcoal
drawings. In one, titled /A Sun-headed character in a garbage bag
/(2022), Kadan renders a black trash bag akin to those rumored to have
been used to transport the bodies of soldiers killed during Russia’s
invasion. Over the trash bag presides an unsmiling black sun. In
another, similar drawing (/The Sun I,/ 2022), a black sun rises from a
barren field, its stiff rays referencing the same window grates as
/Private Sun/. The trauma of nuclear meltdown is historically tied to
the Chernobyl disaster: as an alchemical symbol, a black sun is used to
illuminate the dissolution of the body, a blackening of matter, or
putrefaction. Its likeness is often used to refer to the use of nuclear
weapons and eternal winter, which lends the exhibition its prevailing
air of nuclear anxiety.
The dark rising sun represents what Kadan calls an “eschatological
optimism” emerging from the soil, emanating darkness. That morbid
fascination with the productivity of the soil and its revolutionary
potential is taken a step further at the back end of the gallery, where
the artist has placed /Tiger's Leap/ (2022): an artefact from an ongoing
series of works that includes enlarged versions of industrial and
agricultural tools—remnants from the 1905 revolution—found by Kadan at
the National History Museum of Ukraine. Utilizing Walter Benjamin’s
notion of a “tiger’s leap into the past,” Kadan explains that the work
is flung “back into a darkness that came before the sun rose,” the
darkness referring to continental European history. With it, Kadan
attempts to interrupt homogenous time in a rejection of abject
historicism. Benjamin’s approach understood the present as a body
resonating with the past in a state of constant flux. In this iteration,
the wrought iron sculpture evokes the exploitation of Ukraine’s natural
resources while questioning our relations with mythical “giants,”
visionary figures of the past.
A series of small, simple architectural renderings of children’s
schools, annotated in Russian, lead towards the back room where a
projected photograph of a burned-out window (in an unnamed location) is
facing the sculpture. As a backdrop, it activates the /Tiger’s Leap/ as
an object of potential violence. On a small shelf nearby, twisted
fragments of green melted glass, presumably from the same site as the
photograph, are presented like artefacts on a light table. Their
translucent forms create a spectral, liquid spill. The projection, glass
fragment, and small architectural renderings are altogether one deeply
moving piece, /Exhibition /(2018), which appears to criticize the
apparatus that turns violence into objects of display. Back in the main
space, the viewer is drawn towards a large photograph of a pedestrian
underpass beneath Obolon Station in Kyiv, which has been turned into a
bomb shelter. The specific entrance in the photograph is said to be
blocked, yet it suspends a momentary sense of possibility. Against the
nuclear-bright sun, the soft darkness invites the viewer in. Anything,
it suggests, is better than that.
*Xenia Benivolski* is a writer and curator. She contributes to
/art-agenda/, /Artforum/ and /e-flux Journal/.
https://www.art-agenda.com/criticism/507743/nikita-kadan-s-victory-over-the-sun
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