Nikita Kadan in Echigo-Tsumari Triënnale 2024, The Objects from Another Place

13 Jul 2024 – 10 Nov 2024
Echigo-Tsumari Art Field, Japan | more info

TOKAMACHI, July 2024

Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan admits it feels strange to be in Japan at all. “It’s kind of a miracle,” he says on a bus making its way through Niigata Prefecture. The artist is visiting for the opening of his new work called “The Objects from Another Place” at Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2024. Bright green rice paddies fly by the window as soft, white curtains hang over the dark mountains, clouds that resemble another art installation in the sparsely populated region.
It took Kadan three days to reach Japan from Kyiv for the art festival, now in its ninth edition. The political weight of “Objects” feels out of step with the rest of the hyper-local new artworks of the triennale. At the same time, it brings a welcome urgency from the outside world.
Kadan’s piece, erected at a former power station in the Tsunan region of the sprawling art site, is light and reflective. The thin wire structures resemble space objects — a rocket, a shooting star — but with lines that are wavy, appearing melted, as if rippling with the heat and humidity of Niigata.
The two objects were created in the likeness of structures that appeared in children’s playgrounds all over the former Soviet Union. Today, from Georgia to Kazakhstan to Ukraine, while many elements of Soviet design have been removed, these space objects still remain, he says, as symbols of social progressiveness, dreams of a peaceful cosmos and the ambitions of humankind.
“There are these cosmic kids playgrounds in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and in Kyiv, they look totally the same. And now a very different kind of rocket flies from Russian territory to Ukraine and hits these children’s playgrounds,” he tells The Japan Times.

The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine weighs heavily on Kadan; even getting to Niigata at all was not a given. He had to wait a day before crossing the Polish border to take his flight from Warsaw because it wasn’t clear his paperwork would go through. Mobility out of Ukraine is incredibly difficult at the moment, especially for male citizens, under the current mandatory conscription laws.
When asked what he hopes local residents and spectators might gain from seeing his work, the artist says, “Do they think their lives are somehow related to what is going on in Ukraine, or in Gaza or in Sudan?” Only time will tell.

BY THU-HUONG HA, 2024, Japan Times

Courtesy photos galerie Transit & Bert de Leenheer