Ceramic Clothing Created From Found Ceramic Tiles by Zhanna Kadyrova.

Re-use, redistribute, repurpose, rethink, reclassify, regenerate, recycle, reclaim. It’s essentially what we do when we take a building and restore or reimagine it. It’s what we do when we re-use clothing items that once belonged to another. Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova, employs a bit of Column A and a bit of Column B.

There’s a slightly unnerving quality about her work. Stiff tiled shirts hang formally on wooden coat hangers, their tiled fabric unyielding and unapologetic. They hang silently echoing the materiality of the walls behind them, tied as they are to the architectural past their very fabric is made from.

Second Hand is the project Kadyrova started in San Paulo in 2014 inspired by the widespread practice of tiling coloured walls in Brazil. Here she purchased second hand, decorative tiles used to cover Brazil’s local shops, cafés and buildings, creating with them her signature eclectic clothing art pieces.

“Using the concept of second-hand as an example, we are talking about buildings that have passed from one owner to another,” explains the artist. “Objects formally reminiscent of clothing are lined with original tiles from the walls of a building or enterprise. Tiled ornaments are transferred identically to their placement on the walls.”

The impetus for the creation of her 2019 installation at Galleria Continua in Cuba, was the history of a building, long since demolished, in which the Film Processing Department of the Kiev Cinema Copy Factory operated for more than 50 years. She brings into this collection her 2015 work from the Darnitsky silk factory from Ukraine. Her pieces are made from the old tiles used in the lining of the premises of the factory or found stored on the site.

‘Second Hand’ series 2019 by Zhanna Kadyrova at Galleria Continua; ceramics collected from old Havana streets, cement, wood, photography (corresponding to each dress), dimensions variable. Photo by Nestor Kim.

In 2017, Kadyrova made a dress for a mannequin made from ceramic tiles that adorned the front wall of a bus station, in Polesskoe, located in the Chernobyl disaster zone. The ornament on the sculpture is identical to the ornament on the wall of the bus station. There is something terribly eerie seeing the beautifully tiled garment while being consciously aware of the devastation that occurred in Chernobyl, and the many thousands of people relocated without their clothing and other possessions, never to return home.

Kadyrova uses clothing as a form for her work, employing materiality collected from buildings to refer to the visual richness of the decors of architecture long since inhabited. It’s a respectful acknowledgement of the life that was lived through these structures, a recognition that some will recall past in the form of memories and others will live through them through her art.