KYIV – VENICE: Zhanna Kadyrova in dialogue with Marta Nyrkova and Vlad Filonenko

Origami as Message

Zhanna Kadyrova, Deer, Pokrovsk Park. Photo courtesy of Pokrovsk24.news

Zhanna Kadyrova’s project Security Guarantees, presented at the 61st Venice Biennale, centres on a concrete deer modelled after a folded origami figure. The sculpture was created for a park in Pokrovsk city in Donetsk region on the site of a dismantled Soviet aircraft that had once carried nuclear weapons. Following the advance of the front line, its evacuation to Venice became an integral part of the work itself, transforming the sculpture into a witness to forced displacement and a powerful metaphor for the fragility of so-called security guarantees.

Marta Nyrkova and Vlad Filonenko’s work Orizuru continues this conversation on a different scale. The paper crane – a traditional Japanese symbol of peace and hope – appears not as a finished artwork but as a form of collective action. Each crane folded by a visitor becomes a personal gesture of solidarity, while together they form a shared message that will also travel to Venice. If Kadyrova’s deer has journeyed through war, the cranes will travel from individual action towards a collective voice.

https://www.ukrainianpavilion.org/