Alevtina Kakhidze

Alevtina Kakhidze’s artistic method is an open and complex rhizomatic network that not only endlessly branches out (being replenished with artistic works) and lacks a centralized structure, but also forms an entire system of relationships, interacting with other types beyond the artistic sphere. Her practice is transdisciplinary, as it goes far beyond issues in the field of culture, accordingly demonstrating the inclusiveness and flexibility characteristic only of an artistic perspective. The disciplines that the artist brings into dialogue with art do not function separately but begin to coexist and influence each other. The artist goes far beyond the format of sanctioned artistic actions or interaction with institutional cultural spaces, immersing herself in the world of flora or creating performances together with representatives of fauna, and so on. Through the appropriate methodological framework, I propose to analyze the development of Kakhidze’s entire activity.

2000s: consumer culture, feminism, and communities

Alevtina Kakhidze was born in the city of Zhdanivka, Donetsk region; there were no artists in her family. She studied at the Yenakiieve City Children’s Art School, later enrolling in the then Dnipropetrovsk Engineering and Construction Institute (now the Prydniprovska State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture) in the educational program “Industrial and Civil Construction.” Later, she moved to Kyiv and began studying at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAOMA) (1998–2004) in the Department of Graphic Arts, specializing in “Fine Arts, Decorative Arts, Restoration.” Kakhidze quickly became disillusioned with teaching and switched to the graphic design course. An important place for the formation of her practice was the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA), where in the 1990s she had the opportunity to see works by famous world artists and later present her own projects. It was visiting the CCA that prompted Kakhidze to return from graphic design to her previous program and later to study art in the city of Maastricht in the Netherlands at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2004–2006).

The starting point of Kakhidze’s artistic practice is the work “Invitation to Australia, or The Museum of One Story” (2002), which won a competition for young artists and curators at the CCA at NaUKMA. At that time, she became the curator of her own exhibition, which featured a total installation of letters, posters, and printed documents related to the refusal of a visa by the Australian embassy. In her practice, the artist avoided traditional artistic media taught at NAOMA, preferring contemporary ones: installation, performance, collage, and readymade objects.

As a student, she initiated a feminist line of practice criticizing hierarchical relations in patriarchal society, where the traditional role of women as muses is challenged, conventional ideas of beauty prevail, and so on. Among the works in this line are: “My Husband’s Eyes Are Like Jeanne Samary’s” (2003), “I Can Be a Girl with Blue Eyes” (2005), “For Men Only, or Betrothed-Disguised, Appear to Me in the Mirror” (2006), and the later work “44” (2018). At the same time, the artist touched on issues of market relations and consumption, difficulties of equal opportunities: “The Most Commercial Project” (since 2004) and “I’m Late for a Plane That Can’t Be Missed” (2010). The artist’s works of various thematic branches highlighted the problem of access to resources available only to privileged categories of society: men, the upper social class, and so on.

In the 2000s, Ukrainian artists actively formed artistic communities, including associations in public spaces against the backdrop of the Orange Revolution and other social changes, among them R.E.P., SOSka, and others. Although Kakhidze is not a member of artistic collectives, she actively builds communities in another way: in 2008, she founded the “Extended History of Muzychi” residency at her home in the village of Muzychi, Kyiv region. After completing her educational program at the Dutch academy, the artist seriously considered the importance of international cultural exchange and since then decided to provide her studio for use by artists from other countries for two months each year.

The first decade of the 2000s is the period of Kakhidze’s formation as an artist. Regarding themes, she begins to consistently engage with socially critical issues, and technically she works within her discipline while challenging artistic form. Her practice acquires a rhizomatic character closer to the second half of the 2010s, with the beginning of collaboration with other fields.

2010s: performative thinking, politics, and children’s education

Spontaneous unsanctioned artistic works appear in the artist’s practice, caused by pure experiment or attentive observation. Performance becomes not only an artistic medium but also a way of everyday thinking for Alevtina Kakhidze. This is how the artist turned a walk and cleaning into artistic works when she followed a stray dog and explored the city “through its eyes” or when she copied every movement of the cleaner of the neighboring house.

The artist’s processual performative practices are not limited to body-oriented works — dynamic objects or drawings as well. Often, graphics become a starting point or result of a certain performance, arise during happenings and actions — their serial nature reflects the process or the drawing gives form to the action or encourages/provokes discussion. Through drawing, Kakhidze comprehends political events and records social changes; the works often contain textual comments. The social media pages where she posts her works embody a long-term drawing performance that testifies to an alternative historiography. For example, since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014, the artist began making sketches from the stories of her mother, Lyudmyla Kakhidze, or Klubnyka Andriivna (as a boy in kindergarten called his caregiver). The artist also shared these stories on Facebook.

At the same time, she initiated the political line of her practice: performances such as “Method of Constructing Political Truth” (2014 – present), first presented at the international Manifesta 10 biennale in St. Petersburg; “News of All Times” (2015), presented at the Moscow Biennale. In the first phase of the war, the artist tested an approach of interaction and made activist appeals that could potentially change opponents’ opinions. At the same time, she not only highlighted events but also explored how political theses are created, how the speaker’s position influences their statements, and what the continuity and causes of the Russian occupation are.

In 2014, Kakhidze began conducting series of workshops and teaching at a local school in Muzychi. The educational direction of the artist’s work can be seen as a branch of the rhizome with many offshoots: community building, understanding political events, performative vision, and so on. In her classes, children learned not to create art but to think, to seek alternative answers to complex questions. One of the main projects of this line was the workshop “For Children About Citizenship of People, Plants, and Animals” based on creating an alternative stand for patriotic education in general education schools. The stand contained 30 questions, for example, “Who can be a citizen?”, “Do plants and animals have passports?”, or “Is it possible to love several countries at the same time?”.

The artist’s educational initiatives, residency, and community projects expand her role in collective practices that came into Ukrainian art in the early 2000s: she often involves groups outside the cultural sphere — active residents of her village, children — and encourages them to artistic cooperation. The 2010s period is for Kakhidze the beginning of a dense intertwining of themes and disciplines, as well as going beyond not only traditional media, as in previous statements, but also artistic work as such.

2020s: legal relations, non-human agents, and decolonization

Kakhidze’s interdisciplinary work format continues to develop after 2020. The COVID-19 epidemic period was marked by acquaintance with a new legal system for her. Then the legal company “Law Net LLC” and Alevtina Kakhidze started an experimental project on the border of performance and legal research. It was an online performance “About Property Rights, or How to Appropriate Jewelry, a Chair, a Yorkshire Terrier, and Put Them in One File” (2020) on Facebook, where she tried to gift her drawings, reproduce works of other artists, etc., and instead received legal advice on how to do this according to the law. Within the project, Kakhidze, in co-authorship with Anatoliy Belov and Alexander Krolikowski, presented a humorous play “Legal Fairy, or Legal True Stories” — stories of rights violations and other precedents from the real experience of the artistic community.

The political line continues to develop, followed by the line of gardening and the plant world — they, as is characteristic of the rhizome, are closely intertwined, complement, and change each other. As early as 2009, the artist moved from Kyiv to the village of Muzychi and took up gardening. In 2014, from observing common features in politics and gardening, the long-term project “Adult Garden” was born. In it, she explores sustainability that can be extrapolated from the plant world to various spheres of human life. The first works of this project appeared at the end of the 2010s, but the line actively grew and gained branches already in the 2020s, among them “Battle of Gardeners” (2018), “Love Triangle” (2021), “Field as a Garden” (2022), as well as separate works: “Seeds of Ukraine” (2020), “INVASIONS 1.2.3” (2022), and others. Works outside the “Adult Garden” project also touched on issues of sustainability in the social dimension: the “Seeds of Ukraine” project helped Kakhidze maintain contact with occupied Zhdanivka after her mother’s death, and “INVASIONS 1.2.3” demonstrated ideas of resilience in confronting the enemy.

With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the decolonial perspective, which is also inherent in Kakhidze’s practice, is activated in Ukrainian cultural discourse. Decoloniality is manifested in works not only on politics or gardening but also on family history. If after 2014 the heroine of some of her works was her mother, then since 2022 the figure of the father appears in them. For example, the video “Is Everything Okay?” (2024), presented at the Maltese Biennale, refers to the Georgian line of the paternal family — from interrupted communication with the grandmother, who did not recognize Alevtina’s and her brother’s Ukrainian subjectivity and considered them Russian children, to the reappropriation of Georgian cultural traditions and memories.

All works in Alevtina Kakhidze’s practice form lines and are almost always interconnected. They do not end but have continuations — they reappear in other contexts and situations. The artist not only explores how to grow a long-lasting garden or have a sustainable active society; her practice reflects certain characteristics of a garden, she herself is sustainable, and her expressions resemble the mechanism of existence of perennial plant species that have a prior soil.

From the 2000s until the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the artist’s practice has been enriched with new forms, works, collaborations, as well as gave new branches to past long-term projects. This made it possible to trace qualitative transformations of her artistic and political language: from experiments with media to complex post-media expressions; from individual works to interdisciplinary projects; from documenting political events to inventing an analytical method and creating participatory performances; from reaction to reflection. And vice versa, in a reassembled order, to once again challenge her own opinion.