Schulz – Kadan: lektury gwiazd i historii

Abstrakt

In Schulz’s works the moment of looking at the sky, reading the ephemeral signs of nature, is special because it opens the everyday reality of Drogobych to history: to the inevitable catastrophe, to time which has not come yet but is already past. This seems to be a good starting point to interpret the works of Nikita (Mykyta) Kadan, a Ukrainian artist who has been taking into consideration the images of history and referring to the heritage of the Ukrainian/Eastern European avant-garde and to Schulz in particular. In his works inspired by Schulz (exhibitions The Mutilated Myth, Stars of the Province), Kadan consistently explores those moments and images which point at the roots of various forms of historical violence. He focuses on the disfigured, blurred vision of history, historical trauma, the continuing relevance and strange temporality of historical records, the procedures of continuous falsifying and de-falsifying of history, as well as mythicization and de-mythicization of reality. However, in the first place they are a kind of premonition of time when potential encounters and collisions turn into a way of reading the unwritten, foretelling catastrophe from the bits and pieces of images.