Untitled 2022

Curator: This piece, simply titled "Untitled," was created in 2022 by Alevtyna Kakhidze, using mixed media, including drawing and collage on paper. It's part of her broader activist-art practice. Editor: Oh, wow, this feels raw, immediate...like ripped straight from a personal sketchbook during wartime. It’s got that chilling energy of lived experience being translated urgently onto the page. What do you make of the sketchbook-like paper material itself? Curator: It underscores that feeling, doesn't it? Kakhidze seems to be explicitly connecting the handmade to the immediacy of resistance. The choice of such a seemingly ephemeral material – paper, collage – against the weight of war suggests a powerful act of making visible the struggle and urgency of our existence. Editor: The composition strikes me too. The figures, rendered in what some might call a 'childish' style, juxtapose strangely with the heavy themes—almost undermining any easy notions of heroism or victory. A Russian soldier protects its statue that includes a "Z" which now feels as symbol, and across from it is TV with propaganda that a statue watches. Curator: Indeed. Kakhidze’s approach destabilizes traditional narratives. The somewhat naive rendering is a critical tool here. The figures feel vulnerable and uncertain; this piece gets beyond simple pro-Ukrainian posturing toward showing how identity gets shaped during moments of political upheaval. It’s about correction, according to text written atop the illustration. Editor: Correction is happening across from TV… I guess we could look to the way it incorporates symbols -- the flags, the statue bearing the 'Z,' the sketched TV playing 'propaganda.' It almost seems Kakhidze sees the act of drawing and collaging, and more generally of hand making as a process of deconstruction – peeling back layers of ideological baggage to reveal something more raw and human. The hand-made fighting the technology made. Curator: Precisely. The material reality here speaks to how art becomes a crucial act of defiance and questioning, far from grand narratives—an act of personal testimony with significant emotional and material consequences. The author reflects here: Het Verzet…Correction Russian Cartoonista…a collaboration and discussion of who is working through these events. Editor: Makes you think about what survives... what traces are left in the wake of destruction, both physical and ideological. And about who documents that. Curator: Absolutely, the sketchbook becomes not just a receptacle of observations, but a defiant space for re-imagining reality.