Asphalt cut-out

Zhanna Kadyrova’s Asphalt Cut-out is not an accidental slab of bitumen. The artist asked workers who modernised roads in the capital of Ukraine before the UEFA Euro 2012 to cut out a piece of old asphalt surface for her. The work belongs to a larger series of objects of similar origin bearing a collective title Data Extraction (2011–2013). Its clear connection with a concrete moment in the contemporary history of Ukraine and Kiev enables us to view it as a relic of a Soviet metropolis on the one hand, and as a trace of the city’s vanishing aspect, a testimony to the transformation and its social and economic consequences, on the other.

Despite the roughness and commonness of the material, or its utilitarian purpose, Kadyrova’s work is distinguished by its aesthetic refinement. The gesture of reaching for a slab of asphalt may be viewed as a dialogue with present tendencies in modern art. Asphalt Cut-out fits the categories of minimalism, brutalism – a current in architecture whose proponents advocated the concept of a bare material, as well as the abstraction and, ultimately, the objet trouvé, a product deprived of its original context by the artist.

Categorizing Kadyrova’s work as belonging to a concrete branch of art poses a challenge. The most obvious classification of Asphalt Cut-out as an object does not exclude the possibility of seeing it in terms of painting or sculpture. The dimensions and proportions of the work fit an average-sized picture; also, it is exhibited on the gallery’s wall. Its three-dimensional character and the traces of use in the form of grooves make it possible to see it as a sculpture, or at least a relief. Kadyrova herself declares that the meaning of objects is more important to her than the formal issues. She chooses those objects carefully, however, secures them with varnish and sets in metal frames – all these actions seem to be dictated by purely aesthetic considerations. What is meaningful is the surface of the slab, which can be viewed as the surface of the canvas. Kadyrova looks for its cracks and fissures, holes and irregularities. In essence, all those defects resulting from the character of the material and from its use and overuse constitute an abstract composition and, at the same time, a memento of Kiev which the artist witnessed becoming a part of the past.

Izabela Kopania

translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz