Alevtyna Kakhidze

b. 1973

Alevtina Kahidze was born in the city of Zhdanivka in Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. In 1991, she moved to Kyiv to pursue a career in art. She enrolled in and graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAOMA), which she currently criticizes. She continued her education at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands, which she considers to be the school that shaped her as an artist. Kahidze's artistic practice began in 2002 when she won a competition for young curators initiated by the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, which ended its work in 2008. Thanks to this victory, Kahidze created her first authorial installation, "Invitation to Australia, or Museum of One History," based on her own unsuccessful attempt to obtain an Australian visa. During her studies at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in 2004, Kahidze initiated a project that involved drawing on storefront windows called "The Most Commercial Project." The project's concept was based on pricing, where the price of the drawings equaled the price of the item drawn. Ten years later, in 2014, Kahidze continued to explore consumer culture, as seen in the street project "Private Collection" from 2008. In 2006, Kahidze performed her first feminist project, "Only for Men, or The One Who Was Destined, Appear to Me in the Mirror." It was from this performance that critic Tamara Zlobina began counting the history of Ukrainian feminist art. In 2008, Kahidze and her husband, Volodymyr Babiuk, opened a private residence for artists in the village of Muzychi called "The Expanded History of Muzychi." Since then she has been there. Since 2013, Kakhidze has been exploring the world of plants and animals in her artworks, embodying the idea of an Adult Garden - a garden in which the gardener intervenes very little. Kakhidze has been working on the topic of the war in Ukraine since 2014 when she initiated the project "[url href=https://www.wikiart.org/en/alevtyna-kakhidze/all-works#!#filterName:Series_strawberry-andreevna,resultType:masonry]Strawberry Andriyivna[/url]", telling the story of her mother's daily life in the self-proclaimed "DPR". In the texts and drawings, the artist describes her mother under a fictitious name. This project was interrupted by the death of the artist's mother, which happened at a checkpoint on January 16, 2019. Since 2018, she has been carrying out the mission of UN ambassador for tolerance in Ukraine. She was a laureate of the Kazimir Malevich Prize of the Polish Institute in Kyiv in 2008, participant in the Manifesta 10 and Manifesta 14, the 7th Berlin Biennale, and took part in a project for the Moroccan Pavilion within the framework of the 54th Venice Biennale. On February 24, 2022, the artist was in the village of Muzychi in the Kyiv region, not far from the front line, where she experienced all the events intensely, observed how the occupation forces seized the region, and later, how they were driven out by the Ukrainian armed forces. Throughout this time, Alevtina Kakhidze recorded and "painted" the events of the first months of the full-scale invasion. In the first series of "Art in a Country of War," the artist shows her extraordinary visual diary.