Untitled 2022

This untitled piece by Alevtyna Kakhidze seems to have been made with simple felt-tip pens on paper. You know, like a stream-of-consciousness doodle, but one with a real emotional punch. There’s a figure standing on what looks like a scale, rendered with such fragile, tentative lines. It’s surrounded by these textual fields, like word clouds, but darker, angrier. The phrases are all about Russians, Putin, war, and this real sense of weight and judgment. The artist uses the text as a kind of material, filling the page with these dense, looping forms that act almost like a barrier around the central figure. Look at how the red ink aggressively encloses these blocks of text, like a warning sign. It reminds me of some of Nancy Spero’s work, where the body is also used as a site of political inscription and protest. But where Spero’s work is epic, this feels more intimate, like a personal reckoning made public. In the end, it’s a reminder that art can be a powerful form of witnessing, even when it doesn’t offer any easy answers.