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Item: Children are surrounded by Art
2020
Mail Art, A2.
Materials: paper collage
Collection: Collection MHKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. M00375).
Сhildren Are Surrounded by Art is a collage that features the cover of a 1970s eponymous brochure about sanatoriums, pioneer palaces, children’s recreation camps and the monumental art that adorned them. The background of the collage is a standard Soviet window grate with radiating bars like the rays of the sun, a recurrent motif in Kadan’s oeuvre. Together with the image from the brochure, it embodies the complexity and mutability of the current Ukrainian historical narrative. The symbols of the past change their position swiftly, moving from the area of encouraged, denied and ignored. These changes are dictated by political history. Thus, gradually crumbling, decrepit, Soviet neo-modernist architecture suddenly became a symbol of resistance towards the new anti-historicalism and conservative political isolationism. Nationalists demand their demolition as part of the ‘policy of decommunization’, while cosmopolitan youth throw their techno parties under their arches.
