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Lada Nakonechna

State of things
05.23.14 - 08.30.14
Exhibition — Espace Croix-Baragnon

Lada Nakonechna's exhibit at Espace Croix-Baragnon. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival 2014.

Lada Nakonechna's exhibit at Espace Croix-Baragnon. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival 2014.

Object lesson of my participation (2013). Courtesy of the artist and the PinchukArtCentre, Kiev. Credits: Sergey Illin.

Born in 1981 in Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine), she lives and works in Kiev.

 

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution that shook Ukraine, Lada Nakonechna was still a student. This undoubtedly explains the importance of the context in her creations, as well as the choice to intervene in the public space through performances and the activist dimension of the artists' and curators' collectives in which she has participated since that time. However, the "state of affairs" she presents here is not only about her native country, but rather about a global situation. The images from which she works are often found on the internet. For example, the images that form part of the compositions that make up the series Constructing the New Landscape (2012). The upper half of the images is based on realistic landscape paintings, which could be reminiscent of German Romanticism, while the lower half shows scenes of demonstrations and riots; the graft is so well done that the struggling bodies seem to melt into the landscape, as if such situations were bound to become natural, or as if, in every patch of peaceful nature, innumerable potential conflicts are hidden. The device is extended to the scale of the exhibition space in Incomplete (2012), a wall drawing that takes over the upper part of the walls and the ceiling of a room, the rest being left empty to better inscribe the visitor, an unwilling actor in this collision between the social body, the violence that runs through it, and immutable nature. The motif of the dividing line is recurrent in the work of Lada Nakonechna, who explores drawing, photography, sculptures and installations. Tirelessly and in different registers, it raises the question of the frontier, which is so crucial today: a picture rail cuts in half an assemblage of photographs representing a tree (Fruit Tree, 2011-2014), which cannot be seen in its entirety; for Personal Shield (2011), the artist has produced a separation grid the size of a body. One imagines it to be mobile, as a way of feeling safe everywhere and always marking the distance of approach that one is willing to grant to others. 

 

A graduate of the National Academy of Art and Architecture in Kiev (2006), she is a co-founder of ISTM - "Art workers' self-defense initiative" and Hudrada Сuratorial Union. Since 2004 she has been a member of the collective R.E.P - "Revolutionary Experimental Space". Her works have been shown in Ukraine and outside Ukraine, in Warsaw, Zurich, Rotterdam, Munich, Leipzig, Berlin (Gallery EIGEN+ART). 

In partnership with the Institut Français in Ukraine and the EIGEN+ART gallery, Berlin. 
Co-produced by Espace Croix-Baragnon, Ville de Toulouse Toulouse International Art Festival.