Nikita Kadan. “Shadow on the Earth.” 2022
Job Description
In mid-March, I began again to draw black arable land and a human figure lying on it. Or — you can look at it differently — a horizontally placed black human silhouette superimposed on the image of the arable land. The motif is specified through repetition. Now, from March until today, it has been repeated dozens of times. Behind this motif were definitely: the image of the Ukrainian “fertile black soil” with all the corresponding colonial connotations, photographs of invaders’ corpses and the well-known plot of “sunflower seeds in the pocket” [1], photographs of their victims, forced burials on agricultural plots, trenches turned into mass graves, soil contamination by war, tomorrow’s hunger, bodies that will not be found soon, “poisoned landscapes” [2]. I define the figure-silhouette as a “shadow.” The arable land absorbs, and the shadow remains on the surface. The shadow marks the place and time where and when the value of life once again ceases to be unquestionable. Also, the shadow cannot be covered with soil or otherwise hidden or erased.
Nikita Kadan
- Marder, Michael. “Vegetal Redemption: A Ukrainian Woman and Russian Soldiers”. The Philosophical Salon, 26, February 2022
- Oslavska, Svitlana. “Martin Pollak. Poisoned Landscapes” / Krytyka, February 2016
