Nikita Kadan. “Tiger’s Leap.” 2018
Job description
The artwork consists of homemade iron weapons made from tools used in the metallurgical industry of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. These weapons were taken up by workers of a machine-building plant in Horlivka (now in Donetsk region) during the failed uprising of 1905. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the military, but this act of resistance (one of many) laid the groundwork for the subsequent successful revolution of 1917 and the beginning of the Soviet empire, and the faith of enthusiasts in the Soviet Utopia was most vividly expressed by avant-garde artists.
The title — “Tiger’s Leap” — is taken from a well-known concept in the works of Walter Benjamin. An interpretation of the “tiger’s leap” by Xin Feng and Kiri Chapman comes to mind, which can also be applied to Kadan’s work: “The ‘tiger’s leap’ into the past rejects the idea of time as something linear and sequential in favor of creatively using examples from the past, which breaks with the temporal continuum. The ‘tiger’s leap’ allows one to perceive the past as a source of divergences and thus draw attention to new
possibilities for change in the present.” Throughout the entire exhibition, Kadan makes a series of tiger’s leaps, appropriating historical events, objects, and projects and reinterpreting them within the framework of the present to resist geopolitical defeats, far-right ideologies, and neoliberal forces.
- Heldhof, B. “Stone Hits Stone”: the past as an urgent present // Nikita Kadan. Stone Hits Stone. — Kyiv: Research Platform PinchukArtCentre, 2021. — 80 p.
