Artists

Nikita Kadan

Press release

The phrase “Silence in the classroom” is perceived by the generation that Nikita Kadan and I belong to as disciplinary. It evokes the unmistakably commanding tone of a teacher calling noisy children to quiet down: silence in the classroom. But now silence pervades. There is no one to command, no one to speak. A proper education has become a privilege. At best, children move to safe underground schools; the presence of a bomb shelter is an advantage, no matter which school you send your child to. The war creates many inversions. Silence in the classroom is one of them. It is no longer an order of a teacher, but an order of things. Silence all around… There is no one left to make noise. The exhibition unfolds across two juxtaposed spaces. The first one features the eponymous installation Silence in the Classroom, comprising school desks and metal plinths displaying pieces of missile debris. The installation seems flawless, silent; yet this is a silence of unrest. The smooth, rigidly structured metal of the plinths contrasts with the twisted metal of the missile. The shards recall abstract modernist artworks, once removed from Ukraine’s artistic context of the 1930s. The artist calls it the “poetry of objects”, treating these fragments as readymades: terrifying militaristic artifacts that bear witness to the history unfolding today. In a sense, these fragments seem to replace those artistic objects, once suppressed, destroyed, or persecuted. One desk in the room features photographs of tour groups to the monument of Artem by Ivan Kavaleridze in Sviatohirsk, viewed from various angles. This monument is a 1927 modernist masterpiece that currently sits literally on the front line, facing the daily risk of destruction Another desk features a book open to a page displaying a reproduction of Anatol Petrytsky’s The Disabled (1924), a seminal work that addresses the aftermath of war through the human body and everyday life. War does not end simply when hostilities cease; it persists in bodies, and memories. Both Artem and The Disabled are landmarks of Ukrainian modernism. Artem represents an idealized hero of the Bolsheviks, and revolution, elevated to the pedestal, while The Disabled embodies an inconvenient, silenced image; it shows how war persists within a weak body, underrepresented or not represented at all. However, both representations coexist and unfold concurrently. Nikita’s The Blind (after Petrytsky’s The Disabled) enters into dialogue with the installation, disrupting its ringing silence. The figure of the blind in art is ambivalent. In Bruegel’s famous parable, the blind man is one who leads others into ignorance, but blindness can also become a figure of spiritual vision: that of the seer, the one who truly looks. The Blind is also the only piece to survive Nikita’s complex, monumental recent installation New Integrity, which was demolished to a heap of metal by a missile strike in Kyiv in July 2026. In this sense, the figure of the blind acquires another resonance: the one who cannot see becomes the one who bears witness, carrying forward what has been lost. By merging these layers, Nikita echoes Walter Benjamin’s ideas about history: the past does not simply remain behind us; it becomes legible again in the present, at moments when different historical times suddenly meet. The second room features recent works on paper. The central piece is Budapest: the entire drawing is occupied by an image of intertwined hands that seem to testify to some kind of a deal. It recalls the classical motif from religious painting, a gesture associated with praying with hands clasped. Yet this handshake is far removed from a gesture of trust or unity. Instead, there is something unsettling in it. What does this handshake bring: a bargain, betrayal, compliance, agreement, compromise? What exactly is contained within this gesture? The work evidently refers to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, signed by Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which was an international agreement under which Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world in exchange for security guarantees for its sovereignty. Who takes on the responsibility for the decisions made in the past? We knew what was at stake. We had seen this history before. And yet we failed to learn from it. The accompanying works in the room return to this failure through images drawn from different moments in art history. They bring together images and memories shaped by war belonging to different times. Yet they revive here, alongside the war happening today. Attack (after The Charging Chasseur or An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging (1812) by Théodore Géricault), depicting the carrier of ruin, and Blitzkrieg (after the eponymous 1941 Soviet anti-Hitler caricature by Boris Efimov), recalling the feeling of an approaching, terrifying force of violence beneath the black sun, bring two images of war into collision. These works confront two different modes of representation of the war: the romantic nobility of an old war, with its heroism and tragic beauty, against cold, almost merciless violence marked with a disregard for human life and the sheer force of destruction. The reference to Géricault is also a critique of art’s propagating capacity to shape our worldview and to establish particular images of war as lasting ideas of heroism and power. Blitzkrieg turns to the image of the executioner of history. The title also carries the bitter promise of ‘taking Kyiv in four days,’ when the war is imagined as something fast, which instead turns into an enduring ruin. Alongside are works on paper in which Nikita embeds small reproductions of pieces by Ossip Zadkine and Vojin Bakić into black, ploughed surfaces of his landscapes. Here, the reproduced images are absorbed into the physical and expressive language of the drawing itself. By quoting works from the past, Nikita does not simply turn towards art history. He brings these images into the present, while his own works become part of a history that is still being formed. But can history actually teach us anything? Can we learn from the past if knowing what happened before does not prevent it from happening again? We have seen these images before. We know these histories before, yet we failed to learn from them. Perhaps this is why Nikita looks back. Not to find an answer in the past, but because the present makes some histories return. He is interested in what has not been fully lived, spoken, or resolved. It does not simply disappear, but remains strangely present. The exhibition inevitably references The Dead Class by Tadeusz Kantor. His play begins with an empty classroom, where elderly people return to their school desks, carrying mannequins representing their younger selves and bringing the past into the present. This work is deeply rooted in personal memory, while Nikita’s work also suggests a political memory. By bringing different moments of the past into the context of today’s war, he asks what happens when what should have become the past becomes the present again. What happens when a history that we thought was behind us reveals itself as unfinished? The past is not simply behind us. Some of it remains unresolved, returning in unexpected forms, demanding to be seen. We recognize these returns and understand their historical references by multiplying numerous historical analogies; however, this recognition does not necessarily produce action. Perhaps this is the most unsettling realization of all: living through a historical moment here and now, we understand, we remember, we witness, but still remain unable to prevent history from repeating human tragedy again. (Text: Tatiana Kochubinska, 2026)