In his works, NIKITA KADAN addresses sociopolitical developments in post-communism at the point of transition from totalitarian to capitalist ideology. At their heart is a critical analysis of the present in Ukraine and its sociopolitical foundations in Soviet communism. Spanning various different media, his oeuvre also reflects his collaboration with architects, sociologists and human rights activists. The neon work Private Suns on the castle’s façade has at its foundation the window grills with a sunray motif that remain widespread in the post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe to this day. Serving equally as a decorative ornament that radiates optimism and as security from break-ins, the grate provide KADAN with an ambivalent motif, which he relates to contradictions in the social. It paraphrases the tension between utopian aims and dreams and their suppression in the dreary and humble everyday life of real socialism and its successor. The translation of the grill motif into a luminescent symbol of the sun forms an object of concrete poetry in which the former totalitarian maxims of a collective hope appear to be dashed and superseded by a myriad of individual and private aims with new, unstable and fleeting alliances.

(Text by Rainer Fuchs, in Yesterday, Today, Today, booklet on the exhibition, Kunstraum Buchberg 2018)

Installed in the context of the exhibition Yesterday, Today, Today, curated in cooperation with the mumok − Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Buchberger Sommer 2018 [Buchberg Summer 2018]

www.nikitakadan.com