The Dilemma Of Diorama
2023

The half-offered, half-withheld structure of a diorama provides a space for aleatory and open representation. The painting placed above the diorama can be viewed from dierent perspectives becoming part of through various shared environment.
The paintings surrounding the diorama gesture to spaces elsewhere and are based on found photographs of mirrors and their reflections*. At the core of The Dilemma of Diorama, clear visibility and condition of knowability are subverted. A world is presented that can simultaneously be stored and displayed.

*These photographs were found on an Ukrainian online marketplace website. I consider these images of mirrors a tool for recording historic conditions, an ephemeral social/material matrix of a certain moment in time. They form an archive, which I started gathering since the beginning of war.

^{architectural environment, 240X460X180 cm, paintings, objects Installation view during Ospring 2023: Raamvertelling, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, NL}
^{Curated by Raimundas Malašauskas}
^{Photography by Gert Jan van Rooij

Special thanks to Sjoerd van Leeuwen and Tomas Heller}

Plein Air Is Unavailable
2021

There is a small room in the Noch space, where I’ve been shown an artist’s video works and short films. A large sheet of gray paper covered the window in this room, keeping the sun out. A few months later, I removed this paper. The paper had acquired a burnt, faded shade from the sun’s direct rays, which filled the main picture plane of the paper, leaving only a few initial fragments at the edges unchangedIn this work, I employ light that can penetrate matter or a structure to create the illusion of instability or the weakness of its resistance. It’s a series of paper works that are labyrinthine, assembled, and woven from ruptures in the structure of objects. Auxiliary elements are used in many of them, such as transparent shells, which give them the appearance of ephemeral structures that play with light and colour. Other sheets of paper, arranged along the floor, create flat layers of paint, texture, and substance. I try to make sure that the sensory qualities of these objects elicit a response from the audience, transferring it from the mode of everyday life to the special mode of attention of the observed, where time slows down, and a new route is laid through a rhythmic pattern of delays, pauses; shifting the focus from objects to many rhythms, temporal distortions; included in the flow of infinite lack of time, filled exclusively with the process of space perception.

Installation, materials: paper, cardboard, watercolor, pastel

A Souvenir Landscape
2021

After my grandfather passed away I inherited a big box, full of filmstrips. There were a great number of carefully cut pictures arranged in special boxes, and a large archive which had its own logic, unrecognizable to anyone else. I knew that he took photos, but I had never seen the images. They turned out to be truly close to me — desert landscapes, bewildered small people. Grandpa had tried to seize and preserve what was around him, to capture the real. His photographs show the endless routine that he observed in the world during his travels as chief mechanic aboard a ship. The images capture his desire to dissolve into the environment, transferring the story onto film. I don’t know if they were a means for him to permeate the memories of his whole life, or just a way to feel the keys to it in his pocket. But the filmstrips have become the space for a possible encounter with an era in which things, people, and conditions are distantly described and flicker, reminding us about themselves.

solo exhibition which includes paintings, found objects, poem, archive notes The Naked Room Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine

curated by Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko
photo by Yevgen Nikiforov

NOCH
2018-
artist run space, residency

Noch Gallery is an initiative of the artist Alexandra Kadzevich and the writer and psychoanalyst Harri Kraievets, focused on short-term research and experiments by artists. These studies were about little-explored phenomena, unexpected situations, and consequences that have yet to manifest themselves. The results of these studies were one-day exhibitions in the studio overlooking the Odesa seaport.

The Noch Gallery emerged in Kadzevich’s studio in June 2018 as a place for 24-hour events-situations that could be shared with others. The goal of Noch is to meet and interact with local art scenes, and to revitalize the artistic field of Odesa by creating an intense discussion environment. For almost 3 years of its existence, Noch Gallery has hosted 34 exhibition projects by Ukrainian and foreign artists, and its space has become an influential cultural location in Odesa.

http://www.noch.space/
https://www.instagram.com/noch.artspace/
https://www.facebook.com/nochspace

DACHA KICKS 2017

Childhood is always a period of absolute anonymity, only you can remember something about yourself. Turning personal memory into myth, fairy tale, and nature, we decided to make the main action a game with the dog as a symbolic return to the dacha practices from childhood. Interacting with intimate notes and diaries from childhood is a good method for reflection and reconstruction of memories. Is it possible to not only reconstruct childhood, but also to share the memory of it with someone else?

Project ‘Countryside Practices: Seasonal Proximity’ took place in a special place — a dacha in the village of Lustdorf. The show took place for one day.
In the attic we showed our old diary entries, notes, clippings, photos, books that we made, film scripts, archaeological finds from our childhood. Music from dierent periods was playing on the cd player.

Duo-exhibition in collaboration with Maria Silchenko
Performative act, installation, diaries, photos, CD player, postcards drawings
Special project for the 5th Odesa Biennale of Contemporary Art «Country practices: Seasonal proximity» Curated by Alexandra Tryanova

Photos by Christopher Pugmire

Empty Places And Filled Faces
2019

Installation, Mixed Media, Collage, Acrylic on Cardboard Tubes, Textile, Dimensions Variable

Kalina, Vinogradna, Sadova
2020

Photo documentation of a series of works in a panorama of a deserted field landscape torn from the urban environment (the village of Morozovka), which has not been visited by my relatives for more than 5 years. Intangible components of exposure, such as light and shadow, noise and silence.It was interesting for me to get out of the limitations of my own space of the workshop-gallery, the «Artistic» practice of art presentation. From a passive participant of the exhibition to become an organizer who independently models her field of activity and creates her own context. In this project, I explored the phenomenology of not yet built-up, open spaces, as well as painting in relation to the surrounding space, as an object that can shape the perception of the territory and reveal its new complex meanings.

Installation, paintings, dimensions variables
Morozovka village, Belyaevsky district, Ukraine
Supported by CEC ArtsLink and Open Place

installation view

COASTAL SIGNS, 2019

Installation, paper, cardboard, acrylic, pastel, wood
the Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, Scotland.
as part of SWAP: UK/Ukraine residency
October, 25

During my residency at the Pier Art Centre, I studied the language of the local communities, where I have tried to unpack visual codes, starting from everyday images, as well as objects seen in museums that attracted me, to merge history and modernity. Some things I saw on the street, these images become decoration in the exhibition space, a layout. I decided to visualise these invisible threads, the relationship of human and nature, the subject and the environment in which it is located. It seems to me in such a bundle, the space around things is ignited. This is an invitation for the viewer to review their own environment, how it is perceived and it is possible to cause that feeling of surprise that makes you see something for which you were not looking.

https://www.pierartscentre.com/

The Way From Eye To Eye
2020

The forms, transparencies and veilings yield to the imagination. Their extreme equilibrium leads us to places where our minds are soothed and comforted.

‘My eye moves slowly. It touches a vague surface hoping to see the whole space. It traces the ambiguity that I desired to return to the image.

It is only the ambiguity that can make it live.

Once walking through a bustling southern city, I saw the paly flickering of crystal curtains wavering in a wind. The cavernous structure of the
folds made a sharp impression on me. They lacked the unnecessary accuracy of a perpendicular shape. Irrational space, infinite fluidity. I wanted to rip the curtain off, allowing the sunbeam to penetrate into the room and fill it with the bright glow – I wanted to let the external inside, as if with x-rays — thereby connecting the interior of the building with the street’..
[Author’s text]

The central subject of Alexandra Kadzevich’s practice is painting. After completing classic art education, she consistently employs painting techniques and tests various materials to explore this medium. In 2018, in her workshop in Odessa, Kadzevich founded the artist-run space

NOCH, which promoted the development of the art environment. Changes in the private space of her workshop have affected the artist’s practice and inspired her to reconceptualize the relations between a work of art, space and architecture — her thinking transformed in the direction of spatially-oriented painting, where the materiality of an object has become crucial, while painting itself has developed ephemerality which is characteristic of an intuitive touch.

[Extract of curator’s text]

Installation, paper and wooden objects, found object, painting, text
Project for ‘Exhibition of the 20 Artists Shortlisted for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020’ Kyiv, UA
curated by Alexandra Tryanova and Bjorn Geldhof
-link-

THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE LIVING HERE
2019

The exhibition features Aleksandra’s latest works that balance between painting, collage and sculpture. Curators Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko selected highlights from the artist’s studio that reveal a moment of transition in her practice—from painting to objecthood, from narration to abstraction and from mastering a media to mastering a space.

“I was asked recently if painting is just a media for me or am I researching it. If I use it as a skill or study its possibilities. I guess, it’s both,”

Aleksandra tells in her interview with Tetiana Kochubinska for YourArt.

The Naked Room curators Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German comment, “We have been following Alexandra’s practice for several years. She has been persistently testing the borders of the painting medium and questioning her own method of working with it. Works on display are not exactly paintings. Although it is the distinctive painterly qualities and Alexandra’s sense of color that unites these various works into a statement. Now her studio is filled with something completely different. To a certain extent, the exhibition at The Naked Room is a milestone—one that sums up the artist’s practice and leads the way to a new one.”

Paintings, wooden objects
The Naked Room Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine
curated by Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko
Photography by Yevgen Nikiforov

Asking My Own Life for My Own Collection, 2019 wood, acrylic, collage 26,5x15,3x2 cm
Stayed in a Stable World 2017 panel on stretcher, acrylic, collage 73Х60 cm

So And, 2019 diptych 14x7,2x5 cm oil on wood

Sewing Machines, 2019 wood, collage, oil 8,5×11 cm

Staying In a Stable World, 2017 acrylic on panel, collage 70X55 cm

Fragment of work 'Every single One' 2016 panel on stretcher, mixed media, acrylic 55*75 cm

Installation view

There Are Other People Living Her, 2019 Wood, oil, collage 15х45х2,5 cm

Cheerful Despair, 2019 panel on stretcher, acrylic, collage 33х42 cm

Installation view

Asking for My Own Life, 2019 wood, acrylic, collage, 26,5x15,3x2 cm

The Fools, 2017 wood, acrylic, collage, 16x8x4 cm

Stargeon, Grey Hair, Secretary, 2019 oil on wood, collage 16,3x30x4,7 cm