Reconstituted Weapons: A Tiger's Leap (spear)

Nikita Kadan’s twin sculptures are replicas of the kind of improvised wrought iron weapons fashioned from tools used in mining and metallurgy in Gorlovka (today Horlivka) in the Donbass region of Ukraine. In the tumultuous days of the Russian Revolution in December 1905, as Donbass coal miners went on strike for better working conditions, their protests swiftly escalated into a full- scale uprising. Harnessing their expertise in metallurgy, they repurposed their tools to forge primitive weapons, wielding them as symbols of defiance against imperial oppression. Also known as the Gorlovka massacre, the uprising was met with harsh repression and spawned one of the largest and bloodiest battle between Tsarist government forces and the labor movement. Despite its failure, the uprising remains a symbol of resistance against the imbalances in power and arms, mirroring today’s disproportionate military capacities in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of “a tiger’s leap into the past,” Kadan’s series engages both with Ukraine’s history and the politics of memory, particularly amid shifting geopolitical dynamics involving Russia, the EU, and the Soviet legacy. Rejecting the linear progression of a history written by the victors, Benjamin’s concept advocates for a revolutionary reinterpretation of the past as catalyst for alternative pathways. According to this anti-evolutionary concept of history, the past is never fully gone, it can be called upon by what Benjamin refers to as the “tradition of the oppressed.”

This approach aligns closely with Kadan’s practice, which manifests a particular sensibility for the status of history and art’s ability to visualize the mechanisms that regulate the dynamics between forgetting and memory.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "The Ecologies of Peace", C3A, Córdoba, 2024)