Kakhidze Alevtina
“Since that unknown day and hour, I have been sketching my relationship with plants and admitting my admiration for them — for all of them! I sincerely wonder how the plants managed to embody a real anti-militarist movement. They do not kill each other instantly, they have a stable position — they do not know how to run, that is, run away. The future is theirs.”
Alevtina Kakhidze is an artist whose practice spans performance, drawing, installation, and text. She was born in 1973 in Zhdanivka, Donetsk region; studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv, and later at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. She currently lives and works in the village of Muzychi near Kyiv.
Her work explores themes of identity, freedom, borders, and social transformation. Kakhidze’s artistic language combines personal experience, everyday observations, and political context, creating a space for critical reflection on reality. A significant part of her practice is dedicated to the experience of war, everyday life in Eastern Ukraine, and the rethinking of collective memory.
She is the author of several landmark projects, including “My Husband’s Eyes Are Like Jeanne Samary’s” (2003), “For Men Only, or Betrothed, Show Yourself in the Mirror” (2006), the long-term series “Klobnyka Andriyivna” (2014–2019), the diary cycle “War Diary” (2022), and the series “Collective Blindness” (2022). Her works have been exhibited at the PinchukArtCentre, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Manifesta 14 in Kosovo, and numerous other international institutions.
In 2018, Kakhidze was awarded the Women in Arts Award, established by UN Women Ukraine and the Ukrainian Institute. She has also taken part in many international residencies and is considered one of the most prominent and recognizable contemporary Ukrainian artists.
Currently, Alevtina continues to work on series dedicated to the war and everyday life in Ukraine, combining visual art with textual narratives. Her practice seeks new artistic forms to address complex social and political processes in a sensitive and accessible way.
