Untitled 2022

Alevtyna Kakhidze made this ink drawing using simple materials, but it's full of dark humour. You can tell by the hand-drawn quality of the line work that the artist is thinking through something on the fly. I wonder if Kakhidze feels like she's in a bind when making work about politics? She’s got a delicate touch, and is laying down these really simple images one after another. The drawing is so immediate; there’s something really vulnerable about it. I imagine her being in the studio, feeling like she's in a race against time. There’s a tension between a desire to create something beautiful and the need to speak out against injustice. It is almost like a comic strip but it isn't, and maybe that's the point. Artists are always responding to what came before, and in this case the artist is saying something urgent in her own way. There’s no one right way to think about war. Every mark is a decision, every line a question.