Border Memory
Photo: Foto: Pär Fredin
Border Memory is the first solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova in Sweden. Through large-scale installations, video and drawings, she depicts the reality of the Ukrainian people since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Exhibition period: February 17, 2024 – May 5, 2024
Vernissage: February 17
Entry: Free entrance
Visit the exhibition: Explore practical information, such as the museum’s opening hours and other essential details, before your visit.
Welcome to Uppsala Konstmuseum
Zhanna Kadyrova was born in 1981 in Brovary in the Kyiv region, Ukraine. She currently lives and works in Kyiv. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Kadyrova's art has focused entirely on the war. The destruction, the displacement of refugees, and the vulnerability, but also the gap between being present in the midst of the war and following the events from a safe distance.
The war started in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and Donbas, but it is also a repeated historical pattern of Russian imperialism. In approaching this ongoing trauma, Kadyrova lets infrastructure - the framework of our society of roads, houses and barriers - speak of the horrors and desperation of war. A wound in the asphalt caused by a shell, or a shot-up sheet metal, can represent the human suffering and attempts to annihilate a nation.
Right now, the war is in a destructive phase where the grinding trench line moves a few meters east or west. In the exhibition Border Memory, Kadyrova asks what defending the integrity of the nation state means on a deeper level. Does a border have a memory? And what are the metaphysics behind these boundary lines that have dissolved and shifted over the centuries?