top of page

TRASH MONUMENTS

2005 – 2010

Many of Kadyrova’s tile projects enter into indirect dialogue with the Soviet tradition of beautifying public spaces where ceramic tile, replacing mosaic smalti, sometimes served as a monumental material. Tile mosaics decorated countless public places, and they performed not only a decorative, but also an ideological function (similar to the tradition of religious icons), representing the mythology of the Soviet nation in a visual form. 

 

In her series of sculptures Trash Monuments Kadyrova rethinks the monumentality of ceramic tile by immortalizing objects that receive little attention in everyday life. Cigarette packs, candy wrappers, tea bags and other insignificant waste that fills our everyday lives are all included in the artist’s project, which was created over several years. Most of the items represented in the series are not valuable in and of themselves but are merely packages, wrappers, containers – all those waste by-products that contemporary society produces in the attempt to package reality in a nice container. The artist looks at that garbage through the magnifying glass of 

the artistic gesture, transforming litter into monumental sculptures half as tall as a person. Like the world beyond Lewis Carroll’s looking glass, the world constructed by Kadyrova is one of hypertrophied forms, where even an apple core or disposable coffee stirrer are full of particular significance. 

 

But Trash Monuments have yet another important artistic factor, one that introduces a psycho-emotional aspect to the narrative of the existence of everyday objects. Kadyrova portrays each of these objects as crumpled, broken, squashed – thus transforming all this trash into a memorial to the human gesture, the momentary and often unconscious movement of the hand crumpling a cigarette pack, discarding a candy wrapper, tying up a garbage bag. This indexical sign of the body – the imprint of emotion – looks rather destructive. What vital dramas are concealed in a crumpled cigarette pack or battered road sign? Trash Monuments are less a testimony to the fact of damage, as an invitation to viewers to ponder the stressful situations that are imprinted in the surrounding objects of the material world.

© Тексты о работах: Олена Червонык, Виталий Атанасов

© Дизайн: Денис Рубан 

© Переводы: Лариса Бабий,

Екатерина Кочеткова, Марьяна Матвейчук,

Куролай Абдухаликова

bottom of page