Viewed from a distance, Zhanna Kadyrova’s latest works might seem like abstract and very heavily impastoed paintings. Close up, however, they soon reveal themselves for what they are: sizeable rectangles of asphalt – actual bits of road – pitted and scarred from violent showers of shrapnel.
These slices of road surface, complete with traces of white lines, come from Irpin, the commuter town on the western fringes of Kyiv occupied by the Russian troops last year – and the scene of some of the worst fighting in the early days of the full-scale invasion. After the town’s liberation, and with the permission of the mayor, Kadyrova had these chunks cut out of the street. “They are readymades,” says the artist, in her low, throaty voice as we sit in the autumnal sun outside her studio in Kyiv, part of a tumbledown 19th-century former distillery loomed over by new high-rises. “Part of their titles are the precise coordinates of where we found them.”
