Nikita Kadan

Nikita Kadan was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1982 and lives and works there. He graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv in 2007, where he studied monumental painting. He has been a member of the R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) group since 2004 and a co-founder and member of HUDRADA (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective, since 2008. His multidisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of political engagement, historical research, and institutional critique. Kadan has gained international recognition for his uncompromising investigation of the "dark and traumatic histories" of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In 2015, he participated in Hope!, the group exhibition presented in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. His practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, frequently addressing the collapse of socialist utopias, the persistence of state violence, and the ways historical trauma shapes the present. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, his work increasingly approached art as a "trial" of history and as evidence of wartime suffering, destruction, and resistance. Throughout his career, Kadan has developed a methodology of "archaeological" intervention. One of his best-known projects, Procedure Room (2009–2010), consists of souvenir plates printed with drawings depicting methods of police torture, exposing forms of institutional violence that usually remain undocumented and invisible. The work demonstrates how the aesthetic of the "everyday" can be subverted to reveal systemic brutality. Kadan frequently collaborates with historians, architects, writers, and human-rights activists in his examination of archives and contested histories. In The Veil of Irpin (2023), he used rubble and metal sheets damaged and deformed by war to create a rigid metal flag suspended from a large cross. By combining modernist architectural references with materials marked by conflict, he investigates the "politics of form" and the continuing struggle over historical memory. Kadan’s work has been presented at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, mumok in Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. His works are held in public collections including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, mumok, M HKA in Antwerp, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and the National Art Museum of Ukraine. He received the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2011, a Special Prize from the Future Generation Art Prize in 2014, the Kazimir Malevich Art Award in 2016, and the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in 2022. Kadan’s work bridges artistic abstraction and social reality, examining the intersections of history, ideology, violence, and collective memory. Through his critical use of archival images, architectural forms, and materials bearing the physical traces of war, he confronts the "historical darkness" of the present while questioning how the past is preserved, represented, and politically instrumentalised.