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Kakhidze Alevtina
Print on the artist Kulikovska’s personal garment. From Maria Kulikovska’s collection.
This T-shirt with an original print by Alevtina Kakhidze was created nearly a decade ago as a spontaneous performative act. At one Kyiv art event, Maria Kulikovska, upon meeting Alevtina, took off the shirt she was wearing and handed it over — inviting her to inscribe the fabric with her own drawings using silkscreen. The gesture resembled the shedding of one’s own skin and offering it up as an act of trust, solidarity, and support.
Now, this intimate garment — marked by the touch of a close friend — becomes part of Kulikovska’s curatorial environment, placed beside Daria Khozhai’s paper “room of psychoanalysis.” Together they transform the exhibition space into a field of dialogue between women artists, where something that belongs to a body, the domestic, and the personal acquire symbolic dimension.
Kakhidze’s print — plants and a rabbit bearing the inscription “Do you see me?” — resonates not only as a quotation from her artistic vocabulary but also as a gesture of visibility, echoing themes of self-reflection, presence, and vulnerability. The use of a personal, worn garment as a canvas for artistic imagery underscores the intersection of lived experience, everyday life, and artistic representation.
In the context of the exhibition, the T-shirt functions as an artifact of mutual recognition between women artists — a component of an intimate ecosystem that unites Khozhai’s paper “room of psychoanalysis” with the corporeal-interior paintings of Karina Synytsia. Together, they shape a shared inner landscape, where objects, images, and words serve as vessels of memory, empathy, and co-presence.
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.
