Contemporary art in Ukraine has provided a profound method for processing the trauma of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which recently entered its fifth year.
Nikita Kadan, one of Ukraine’s most prominent artists, is exploring the loss of limbs during the conflict in his new exhibition, opening on 11 April at Pavilion 13 in Kyiv. The show, titled A New Integrity, comprises an installation made of prostheses, which will be shown running in mid-air on a stage. Their movement will be set to soundscape by Clemens Poole as well as recorded testimonies from veterans interviewed for the project.
“There are plenty of young people missing limbs on Ukrainian streets, a lot of young veterans with prostheses,” Kadan tells The Art Newspaper. “This topic is somehow essential for understanding what is going on with Ukraine. Ukraine lost something. It is losing people, territories, some perspectives of future development. On the other hand, there are always some attempts to replace this, to find compensation, to have something else instead.”
The veterans’ stories are being voiced by the actress Anastasiia Seheda, without “images of bodies” or faces, Kadan says. The interviews were arranged by the Superhumans Foundation, which provides for veterans’ rehabilitation, and they were conducted by the sociologist Sofia Lavreniuk. The interviewees names have been changed for the exhibition.
Nikita Kadan’s drawings for A New Integrity, commissioned by RIBBON International, 2025.
Photo: Adam Simons and RIBBON International
“The interviews tell different stories of how Ukrainians join the army, of what happens to them inside,” Kadan says. “Imagine one second a guy sees a drone over his head and the next second he’s in a surgery room without legs and arms. What happens without legs and arms? What happens to personality, how does a person change, and how do people redevelop themselves?”
In her essay for the exhibition booklet, however, the Ukraine-born writer Katja Petrowskaja says the exhibition also avoids “[reducing] a person to their trauma”. She adds: “It is a work about the space of loss and pain, yet the body itself is modestly removed from it—what the artist cannot allow himself to present, as if leaving this right to the protagonists themselves, to the voices of those who have experienced amputation, granting them a free space for self-description.”
The booklet itself features some veterans’ stories, which highlight complexity and nuance. One of the veterans, Oleh, says about his two prostheses: “It’s… strange. It’s cool, and it’s terrifying at the same time… there’s even something aesthetic about it.” He adds: ”You can see how people look at you. Their gaze starts low, then slowly moves up higher, higher. I wait for the moment when they finally meet my eyes. But they don’t.”
The project, commissioned by RIBBON—a not-for-profit platform that supports Ukrainian culture—took a year to develop, interrupted by Russia’s brutal assaults on Ukraine through the winter, which plunged the country into cold and darkness. Pavilion 13 is a restored 1967 glass-walled brutalist landmark in Kyiv, built in the Soviet-era as an exhibition space dedicated to the coal industry.
A history of activism
Kadan has a practice rooted in activism. He was known before Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2014—and Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine the same year—for depicting Ukrainian police brutality, which was rife at the time. Since 2014, he has created sculptures from rubble, which he used to collect in eastern Ukraine. From 2022, however, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, it began appearing at his studio doorstep in Kyiv.
“I don’t have to go far to get the rubble,” he says. “I don’t have to look [for] something which is hidden from me, such as police torture. Everything happens here and now just in front of my eyes. People’s lives are taken.” He adds that this includes the lives of many artists who have been drafted or volunteered to fight.
A New Integrity hints at the state of Ukrainian society four years on from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. “It [reflects] a constant process of being on the move when totally exhausted,” Kadan says. “Your legs are missing but you still have to run, otherwise you die. It’s that simple. It’s about keeping the optimism of will under unbearable conditions,” he says, referring to a famous motto by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
The total number of casualties in the war to date is difficult to ascertain, as Russia does not disclose them and Ukraine rarely does either. According to a January study by the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russian forces suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties—which include those killed, wounded, and missing—between February 2022 and December 2025, while Ukrainian forces likely suffered somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties. In February, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that “officially” at least 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since February 2022, but that many more were missing in action.
Kadan’s exhibition will also feature black-and-white reproductions of works by other Ukrainian contemporary artists, including Dasha Kuzmich and Mykhaylo Palinchak, as well as of works by the Modernist painters Anatol Petrytsky, from Ukraine, and Otto Dix and Heinrich Hoerle from Germany. The pieces will be displayed in vitrines.
Disabled, a 1924 work by Petrytsky, depicts a woman caring for the men in her family, all of whom have been maimed, including a child left with no legs. Dix’s War Cripples (1920), shows veterans of the First World War with prostheses marching down a street.
Kadan says he selected the works of Dix and other German artists in part because of the warning they offered about the rise of Hitler in the aftermath of the First World War, which went unheeded. “[These] artists are seeing that everything will collapse in the most painful way,” he says.
The title of the Pavilion 13 show, Kadan says, references to what he describes as the present-day choice between “fascist integrity” and “democratic integrity” facing the whole world while the post-Second World War order collapses. “[Right] now we are rather broken to pieces and unable to choose our way.”
Kadan adds, however, that he has been inspired by the “positive role of fatalism” in the veterans’ stories. “Sometimes people accept what is given,” he says. “They are not broken. They start to regenerate… Maybe we can be like trees and plants growing on the ruins. There will still be room for regeneration, for slow healing.”
