“Anyone involved in the decision to reopen the Russian Pavilion at the Venice International Art Exhibition after the pause that followed the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine either does not understand the world they live in or is knowingly cooperating with Russia, a country committing crimes of an unprecedented scale and cynicism in Europe since World War II,” says Alevtina Kakhidze, a prominent Ukrainian artist known internationally (she represented Ukraine at the Malta Biennale in 2024, exhibited at BASE in Milan last year, took part in Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg in 2014, and participated in the Working for Change project of the Moroccan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011). She also reminds that “the war is ongoing.”
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 cannot be balanced merely by creating 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 led Russia not to participate in the 2022 Exhibition, held a few months after the start of its “special operation,” and to cede the space in the Giardini that it had opened in 1914 to Bolivia in 2024-is not over.
“Since 2014, every passing day has become heavier for me. I have lived with the war for almost 12 years. I have buried friends who enlisted and were killed,” Kakhidze says in an interview with Adnkronos, naming Margarita Polovinko, an artist and drone pilot, and David Chickan, an artist and mortar operator. “People close to me were forced to flee because their homes were destroyed, and my aunt is still recovering from blast-related pressure trauma,” she adds. Kakhidze has lived since 2008 in Muzychi, 26 kilometers from Kyiv and not far from Bucha-“a 47-minute drive,” as she wrote in a work about the massacre of civilians committed by Russian forces early in the invasion-where she ran an artist residency that stopped in 2022.
“Because of Russia’s actions, we just endured the hardest winter imaginable-more than four consecutive days without electricity in temperatures down to minus 28 degrees. We are exhausted by this war while the world increasingly behaves as if it did not exist,” she says, commenting not only on the return of a Russian project to the Venice Biennale but also on the readmission of the Russian team to the Winter Paralympics in Cortina and the lifting of certain sanctions against Moscow.
On the proposal to open a space for dissident Russian artists in Venice, she stresses that the issue is first of all practical. “If so-called dissident Russian artists are outside Russia, it is hard to consider them dissidents of a country they no longer belong to. If they remain in Russia and work anonymously, it is very unlikely, in the current conditions, that they would risk revealing their identities publicly. And they could not participate even if they support Ukraine-or if some even fight alongside Ukrainian forces,” she observes. “I think this idea functions as a form of linguistic manipulation. Russian actors play with terminology and narratives, while many Western actors lack the contextual understanding needed to critically assess such proposals. As a result, words are often taken at face value, without awareness of how they are constructed or instrumentalized.”
When the Donbass conflict began in 2014, pro-Russian forces occupied Zhdanivka; Kakhidze’s mother refused to leave. The artist dedicated the work “Klubnika Andreevna” to her and to life in those early years of the war. The series of drawings-Kakhidze’s works often resemble childlike sketches-was based on the stories her mother told her by phone in that period. The protagonist, Klubnika (Russian for “strawberry”), was the nickname given to Ludmilla, who was killed at age 70 at a checkpoint she had to pass regularly to reach Kyiv-controlled territory to collect her pension; the work also features a child from the kindergarten where she had worked as a teacher.
The reopening of the Russian Pavilion “represents for me an ethical lapse and a certain infantilism and detachment from the context in which we all live,” Kakhidze adds. How did the Ukrainian artistic community react? Rather than surprise, the announcement prompted “growing disappointment at the world’s erosion.” “It is clear to everyone that people are afraid to be decisive and to acknowledge how deeply indebted they are to Ukrainians. It is often easier to think about us inadequately or with detachment than to act in the ways we need,” she says.
While her art “has always included politics,” in Ukraine today “no one can make art without politics.” Although “I would very much wish it were otherwise,” Kakhidze emphasizes-she trained at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and among many honors has received the Kazimir Malevich Prize, a joint Ukrainian-Polish award given every two years to Ukrainian artists under 45 (she is now 53).
In 2014, at the very start of the first phase of the conflict, the artist took part in Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg with the performance “Methods of Building the Political Truth”-an imaginary press conference in which several characters, all performed by the artist and indicated by different drawings, answered questions from fictional journalists.
This was not an echo of the “troll factory” then operating in the same city, but a deliberate need to speak in multiple voices-voices not entirely at odds with each other-to maximize the chance of being heard. “It was the true beginning of the war between our countries. In those days I tried to do everything I could. In Saint Petersburg I tried to speak to anyone willing to listen. To be heard, I had to invent particularly creative modes of expression. So I created different positions from which to speak. Each character or role I chose had its own logic, its own way of interpreting reality. On stage there were the tourist, the external observer, the fighter, the internal observer, the mediator. Later I added the gardener. They were not radically opposed to each other.”
“My approach is rooted in observing communication,” explains the artist-often referred to as a gardener, since the plant world recurs in her work and is used as a political and social metaphor. “I was not interested in who was ‘right,’ but in how that ‘right’ is constructed from the experiences people have and from their positions in relation to reality.”
“Participating in Manifesta taught me many things about Russians. I took part in meetings where some spoke of democracy and generosity-people who later supported the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Among them was the Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky,” Kakhidze recalls. On June 21, 2022, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Piotrovsky explicitly said that “our recent exhibitions abroad are a kind of special operation.” In that interview, the term ‘special operation’ directly echoed the Russian official term used for the invasion of Ukraine. By using that language, he framed cultural activity, exhibitions, and curatorial work as parts of the same ideological and geopolitical machinery of war, suggesting that culture can function as an extension of state power and influence abroad. Is the world aware and responding? Yet Mikhail Piotrovsky continues to travel freely in Europe, while Canada is the only Western country that has imposed sanctions on him,” the Ukrainian artist concludes.