Shots

The cycle Shots was conceived as a work situated on the borderline between an abstraction, a performance and an inquiry into the properties of a material. In 2010, when the first objects were made, Zhanna Kadyrova was interested in the effects of immediate destruction of ceramic tiles: she struck the shiny, monochromatic surfaces with heavy tools or shot at them with rubber-bullet weapons. The network of crack that instantly appeared on the smooth tile evoked a number of aesthetic emotions in the viewer. These abstract lines were associated with a variety of natural forms: spider webs, radiating leaf veins, cracks on eggshells. The gesture of destruction had, perversely, the character of an act of creation, since in effect, a new quality was created: in the process of becoming useless and destroyed, the object gained the features of a beautiful one.

Four years later, Kadyrova’s explorations acquired new meanings. When the war in eastern Ukraine broke out in 2014, it was difficult not to associate the artist’s actions with the fact that at that time, shots were aimed mostly at people. In creating her next works, Kadyrova reached for tools of destruction of a very different nature, for instance the Kalashnikovs used during the fighting in the east of the country. The holes and cracks that appeared on the tiles became an metaphorical image of military actions. As Kadyrova herself admitted, it was difficult for her not to think what happens to a human body when a similar shot is fired at it.

Kadyrova’s objects are also a record of dramatic changes and aggressive political processes evident in Ukraine, of the hostile ideologisation and restrictions on social life. In the history of art, the language of abstraction has many times permitted to escape the invasive reality and the brutality of events, as well as to evade direct representations of truth. In the case of works from the Shots cycle, the enchanting beauty of abstract cracks created in an uncontrolled way serves to emphatically talk about evil. Beauty reveals here its ambivalent and perverse nature; hence, the viewer may perceive Kadyrova’s objects in terms of a dissonance. Awareness of the context in which the cycle was created compels us to push aside its decorative quality, making way for a stern moral message.