Biennale Arte: from the Pokrovsk front to the Giardini entrance, the long road of Kadyrova’s ‘Origami Deer’

The concrete sculpture was produced by Kiev-based Kadyrova in 2018, commissioned by the Pokrovsk municipality as part of a project to redevelop the large Yuvileyniy park, to use a pedestal where a Su-7 military aircraft that could be armed with nuclear warheads once stood. Kadyrova had covered the base with turf and created the deer to place on it.

In 2024, before the fall of the city of Donbass, the co-curator of the Ukrainian Pavilion for this year’s Exhibition, Leonid Marushchak, historian and director of the NGO ‘Museum Open for Reconstruction’, was busy trying to take works of art away from the cities on the front. He had managed to convince the local authorities to give the go-ahead for the evacuation of the statue from Pokrovsk, proposing that they also move the monument to the much-loved Ukrainian composer Mukola Leontovych together. On August 30 of that year, together with Kadyrova, he finally followed the dismantling of the statue and its transfer, to Kiev and then to Yasinya, Ivano-Frankisvk and Lviv. Kadyrova, Marushchak and co-curator Lsenia Malykh proposed the design for the Pavilion, which was then accepted, focusing on the ‘Origami Deer’ and its history intertwined with the ongoing war. At the Ukrainian Pavilion “IDP” will be screened, the documentary of the transfer operation of the work, signed, like all the works presented, by Kadyrova.

The relocation of the sculpture during the war “raises questions about the unimplemented security guarantees that Ukraine had believed in when giving up its nuclear arsenal in 1996. Similar to these guarantees, which existed only on paper, the paper-inspired sculpture now exists suspended between security and wholeness,” the Pavilion’s curators point out. The Origami Deer passed through Warsaw on March 8th, Vienna on the 10th, Prague on the 12th, Berlin on the 13th and 14th, Brussels on the 18th and 19th, and Paris on March 23rd, before continuing its journey to Venice.