Untitled 2022

Alevtyna Kakhidze made this drawing with pen and what looks like felt tip on April 16, 2022. It has a kind of raw immediacy, a sense of the artist thinking through things as she puts them down on the page. I imagine her hand moving quickly, trying to capture the fleeting connections between politics, economics, and human experience. The drawing is full of text, diagrams, and figures, all rendered in a simple, almost childlike style. There's a figure of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, next to a Javelin missile and what looks like a tank. The handwritten text is really striking—it's like she's having a conversation with herself about the cost of war, the value of human life, and the absurdity of it all. I wonder what she was feeling as she made this. The black outlines are so direct. It feels like she is urgently showing us how the war looks and feels. Ultimately, it is a reminder of how artists engage with the world, processing complex emotions and ideas through the act of creation.