[spectre] Fwd: REVIEW: Xenia Benivolski on Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan’s “Victory over the Sun” at François Ghebaly, New York

[Andreas Broeckmann]

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-agenda at 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