“Whoever allowed Russia to return either doesn’t understand the world or cooperates with Moscow”

“Those involved in the decision to reopen the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition after the hiatus that followed the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine either do not understand the world they live in or are knowingly cooperating with Russia, a country that has been committing crimes of unprecedented scale and cynicism in Europe since the Second World War.” Remember that “the war is ongoing”, Alevtina Kakhidze, a prominent Ukrainian artist who is also well known abroad (she has, among other things, represented Ukraine at the Malta Biennale in 2024, exhibited at Base in Milan last year, in 2014, at Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, and participated in the Working for Change project of the Moroccan Pavilion at the 54th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2011).

Born in Zhdanivka, a settlement in the Donetsk region occupied by pro-Russian forces since the conflict began in 2014, Kakhidze believes that Russia’s presence at the exhibition opening in Venice in May does not balance with the opening of a space for dissident Russian artists alongside the project “The Tree is Rooted in the Sky” curated by Anastasia Karneeva. The war in Ukraine – which had led Russia in 2022 not to participate in the Exhibition inaugurated a few months after the start of its ‘special operation’, and in 2024, to cede to Bolivia the space opened in 1914 at the Biennial Gardens – is not over.

On the contrary. “Since 2014, every day that passes, it becomes heavier for me. I have been living with the war for almost 12 years. I have buried friends who enlisted and were killed”, reports Kakhidze in an interview with Adnkronos, citing the names of Margarita Polovinko, artist and drone pilot, and David Chickan, artist and mortar operator. “People I care about have been forced to evacuate because their homes were destroyed and my aunt is still recovering from pressure trauma following the bombings,” says Alevtina Kakhidze who has lived in Muzychi since 2008, 26 kilometers from Kiev and not far from Bucha, “47 minutes by car”, as she wrote in one of her works dedicated to the massacre of civilians carried out by Russian forces shortly after the start of the invasion. And where he opened an artist residency that ended in 2022.

“Due to Russia’s actions, we have just spent the most difficult winter we could ever imagine, without electricity for more than four days in a row, with temperatures of minus 28 degrees. We are exhausted from this war while the world increasingly behaves as if it were not there,” he adds, commenting, in addition to the return of a Russian project to the Biennale Arte, the admission of the Russian team to the Paralympic Winter Games in Cortina and the lifting of some sanctions against Moscow.

“As for the proposal to open a space to Russian dissident artists in Venice, the question is first of all its feasibility”, he underlines. “If so-called dissident Russian artists are outside Russia, it is difficult to consider them dissidents of a country of which they are no longer a part. If, however, they remained in Russia and work anonymously, it is very unlikely that they would be willing, under current conditions, to reveal their identity publicly. And they would not be able to participate even if they support Ukraine, if they even fight alongside Ukrainian forces, as some do.” “I therefore think that this idea operates as a form of linguistic manipulation. Russian actors play with terminology and narratives while many Western actors lack the understanding of the context to be able to critically evaluate such proposals. Therefore, words are taken literally, without the necessary awareness of how they are constructed or exploited.”

At the start of the conflict in Donbass in 2014, pro-Russian forces occupied Zhdanivka which Alevtina’s mother had refused to leave. To her and her life in those first years of the war, the artist dedicated the work “Klubnika Andreevna”. A series of drawings – Kakhidze’s works are often apparently childish drawings – based on the stories that her mother told her on the phone in that period, starring Klubnika (strawberry in Russian), the nickname she had given to Ludmilla, killed at the age of 70 at a checkpoint that she was forced to pass regularly to enter territory controlled by Kiev to collect her pension, a child from the kindergarten where she had worked as a teacher.

The reopening of the Russian Pavilion “reflects for me an ethical breakdown and a certain childishness and detachment from the context in which we all find ourselves”, adds Kakhidze. And for the community of Ukrainian artists? Rather than surprise, the announcement was met with “growing disappointment at the fading world.” “However, it is clear to everyone that people are afraid to be resolute and to recognize how deeply indebted they are to the Ukrainians. It is often easier to think of us inadequately or detachedly than to act in the ways we need.”

And while his art has “always included politics,” in Ukraine now “it is not possible for anyone to make art without politics.” Although “I would really like it not to be like this”, underlines Kakhidze – who trained at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Kiev and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and who received, among many awards, also the Kazimir Malevich Prize, a joint initiative of Ukraine and Poland awarded every two years to Ukrainian artists under 45 (she is now 53).

In 2014, right at the beginning of the first phase of the conflict, the artist participated in the Manifesta 10 exhibition in St. Petersburg, with the performance “Methods of building the Political Truth” – the representation of an imaginary press conference in which different characters, in fact the artist, responds, under the different drawings that indicate them, to the questions of imaginary journalists.

Not an echo of the ‘troll factory’ operating in the same city whose existence emerged in those weeks. But the need to speak with different voices, even if not completely discordant with each other, to optimize the chances of being heard. “It was the real beginning of the war between our countries. In those days I tried to do everything I could. In St. Petersburg I tried to speak to anyone who was willing to listen to me. To make myself heard, I had to find particularly creative ways. So I created different positions from which to express myself. Each of the characters – or roles – that I chose had its own logic, its own way of interpreting reality. On stage there were the tourist, the one who observes from the outside, the fighter, the observer from the inside, the mediator. And the gardener, who I inserted later. They were radically opposed to each other.”.

“My approach is rooted in the observation of communication”, explains the Ukrainian garden artist (the world of plants is recurrent in her work and is used as a political and social metaphor). “I wasn’t interested in which of them was right, but in how this right is constructed starting from the experiences one has, or where one finds oneself, based on reality.”

“My participation in Manifesta made me understand many things about Russians. I took part in meetings where some spoke of democracy and generosity, the same people who later supported the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Among them, also the director of the Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky.” On June 21, 2022, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Kakhidze recalls, Piotrovsky had explicitly declared: “our recent exhibitions abroad are a kind of special operation”. In this interview, the term “special operation” “directly echoed the official Russian term for the invasion of Ukraine.” “Using this language, he framed cultural activity, exhibitions and curatorial work, as a cog in the same ideological and geopolitical machinery of war, suggesting that culture can operate as an extension of state power and its influence abroad. Is the world aware of this? And is it reacting? Yet Mikhail Piotrovsky continues to move freely in Europe, while Canada is the only Western country that has sanctioned him,” concludes the Ukrainian artist.