Nikita Kadan in Art Basel Paris

Booth H 15: Voloshyn Gallery & Galerie Poggi

Voloshyn Gallery and Galerie Poggi have jointly presented Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan in the Galeries sector of Art Basel Paris 2025.
Firmly rooted in the events of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, the show examines the country’s contemporary popular culture and studies the work of the modernists against the backdrop of increasing worldwide violence and ruination, ultimately pondering on the future of Ukraine and the world.
Nikita Kadan’s monumental work depicts an imaginary scenario of a realised Shchekavytsia hill orgy. Its occurrence signifies an impending nuclear attack. On the one hand, it is a depiction of a meme; on the other, it is an element of the Ukrainian cultural canon, a great national romantic painting in the tradition of Romanticism, yet simultaneously one that subverts it, revealing hidden social and political mechanisms.

In Ukraine, the topic of the relationship between nation and empire, characteristic of 19th century historical thought, forcefully remains in the ideological center, leading to a delay in other aspects of development. The absence of the “great national-romantic painting” as an attribute of the European nation-state and its “cultural canon” is one of the signs of this delay. This vacant space is filled in later periods as if to compensate, always with some incongruity. Shchekavytsia, with its symbolism of a significant event and epic scale, does not claim to occupy this place, but, rather, speaks of a readiness for such events, whether destructive or fateful. Shchekavytsia is resilience amidst death, a final attempt of love in the face of complete erasure. The story has become a part of a collective history, an example of a nation’s attempt to deal with very public threats of death and destruction.