tatarczuk +

Nikita Kadan, Flag (Dnipro)
Granit, metal, 2025

Waldemar Tatarczuk meets Nikita Kadan on the shared ground of the flag as discourse. Over the years, Tatarczuk has systematically expanded his collection of short video works depicting national flags – cropped out of their wider context, filmed against the sky, fluttering in the wind, or at times falling limply. Pointing the camera at banners in different parts of the world was never the result of a pre-planned project; rather, this practice can be understood as a visual meditation on the relationship between space, the symbols of power that inhabit it, and identity – both individual and collectively constructed. The sculptures by Nikita Kadan that reference the figure of the flag also form an expanding corpus, developed since the onset of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Since then, the artist has been working with materials marked and transformed by war – molten by explosions, torn apart by blasts, pierced by bullets. This brutally shaped matter constitutes the substance of Kadan’s flags: works that are partly found objects, partly material evidence in the ongoing case of the war itself. The metal from which the flag was made was transported from the combined heat and power plant in Kryvyi Rih. The granite used for the pedestal of the flag presented in the exhibition comes from Korostyshiv—a town in the Zhytomyr region that in May became the target of a massive Russian aerial attack directed at civilians. Korostyshiv is known for its granite quarries and stone-working plants, which produce, among other things, tombstones.

The metal for Flag consists of fragments from one of DTEK’s thermal power plants in the Dnipropetrovsk region. This plant, like energy infrastructure across Ukraine, has been shelled with missiles and drones for the fourth year in a row. TPP DTEK’s alone have suffered more than 210 strikes.

Nikita Kadan born 1982 in Kyiv, graduated from National Academy of Fine Art (Kyiv) in 2007. Nikita Kadan works with installation, sculpture, painting, graphics, often in interdisciplinary collaboration with historians, architects and human rights activists. He is a member of the artist group R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and founding member of Hudrada (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective. Kadan lives in Kyiv. His works were presented at in the Ukrainian Pavilion of the 56th Biennale Venice in 2015.
Website of the artist: http://nikitakadan.com