Laura Bulian Gallery is pleased to announce The body of Attis will not decay, the first exhibition by Nikita Kadan (Kyiv, 1982) and Anastasia Potemkina (Moscow, 1984). The political aspect of the idea of ‘Nature’ is common for the practice of both artists, presented in the show with installations, drawings, collages and videos.
The exhibition interprets the Phrygian myth of Attis recorded in Pausania, with its motifs of fluidity and transformation of female and male, living and dead, anatomical and floral, human and divine – bringing these motifs into contemporary political context.
The main characters, Attis and Agdistis, pass through castration to reborn in a new condition. In the myth, according to Pausania, Zeus letting his sperm fall on a stone, creates the demon of Agdistis, that combines the power of male and female, represented by both sexual organs. The other gods, fearing his enormous power, evirate him. From his blood an almond tree grows up, and its fruit gives birth to Attis.
In the works by Nikita Kadan presented in the exhibition,—drawings, collages and installations— the crucial motif is the non-distinction between floral and anatomical—in the drawings of cut and anatomically dissected male organs, and of ‘healing the wound with the green leaf’—in the series ‘Protection of plants’, where floral motifs partly cover the images of war ruins in Donbass. As in the myth of Attis, plants grow on the place of human catastrophe, as a form of permanent re-birth of life.
In the works by Anastasia Potemkina— installations and videos—the human being communicates with the floral world through the psychedelic experience and through the tactile contact with plants.
Nikita Kadan was born in Kyiv in 1982. In 2007 he graduated from the National Academy of Fine Art (Kyiv). Nikita Kadan works with painting, graphics, and installation, often in interdisciplinary collaboration with architects, sociologists and human rights activists. He is a member of the artist group REP (Revolutionary Experimental Space) and founding member of Hudrada (Artistic Committee), a curatorial and activist collective. He Lives in Kyiv.
Anastasia Potemkina was born in 1984 in Moscow, Russia. 2008 - graduated from Moscow Institute of Architecture/ State Academy/ 2012-2013 — student at Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Since 2011-2017 — the member of Urban Fauna Laboratory /UFL/ Lives and works in Moscow.

Opening:
Tuesday 4 December, 2018 at 6.30 pm

mpefm ITALY art press release