Opens june 20, 2026
Zhanna Kadyrova — The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet
In The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet, Kadyrova explores the experiences of displacement, resistance, and regeneration through transformations of Ukraine’s physical landscape. Across five bodies of work made in the years following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kadyrova considers how Ukraine’s land, the earth itself, responds to the threat of erasure with renewal.
Through sculpture, embroidery, photography, and film, Kadyrova lays bare the ways in which ‘Earth’ becomes a site of violence, memory, and resilience. From the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and decimation of its reservoir ecosystem to the mining of agricultural land, the five works that comprise the exhibition attest to how ordinary life survives despite extraordinary pressure.
Palianytsia, Russian Rocket, and Embroideries (2022–) are three ongoing works created in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion, which Kadyrova will continue to enlarge as long as the war continues.
Palianytsia is her iconic series named for the Ukrainian bread that became a marker of identity under occupation; Russian Rocket the series of short videos superimposing Russian rockets onto landscapes visited by the artist; and Embroideries consists of woven portraits that conflate domestic tranquility with the persistent presence of air alarms.
Kadyrova’s large-scale video installation The Forest (2025) examines the consequences of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russia in June 2023, and the surreal new growth rising from the dried bed of the destroyed reservoir. Realized with The Dovzhenko Centre film archive in Kyiv, the City of Zaporizhzhia and the Khortytsia Museum, The Forest is part of a collaborative effort with locals from the Zaporizhzhia region.
The film IDP (2026) documents the evacuation of Origami Deer from Pokrovsk, a city in the Donetsk region, in 2024, when the war’s front line approached. The film traces the monumental sculpture’s odyssey from the park where it sat on a plinth that previously held a decommissioned Soviet bomber, through Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Brussels, and Paris, to the Venice Biennale, where it is the centerpiece of the Ukrainian pavilion’s Security Guarantees exhibition. Origami Deer has become a symbol of hope and survival.
Kadyrova lives and works in Kyiv. She is the recipient of the 2012 Kazimir Malevich Prize, the 2013 PinchukArtCentre Grand Prize, and the 2025 Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Castello di Rivoli, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Kunstverein Hannover, and institutions across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.
