Dana Kavelina
Dana Kavelina (born 1995 in Melitopol; lives in Berlin and Lviv) primarily works with animation and video as well as installation, painting and graphics. She graduated from the Graphics Department of the National Technical University of Ukraine. Her work often explores military violence and war in relation to the position of the victim as a political subject as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her 2020 film “Letter to a Turtledove” was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and included in the exhibition “Signals: How Video Transformed the World”. Kavelina’s works were presented at, amongst others, the Kyiv Biennial, the 60th Venice Biennial, the M HKA Antwerp and the festival steirischer herbst 2022 and 2023. She is the winner of the main prize of the 7th edition of the PinchukArtCentre Prize, shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2024.
GREY EARTH
IN COLLABORATION WITH ANNA NYKYTIUK AND MYKHAILO CHELNOKOV
2025
stop-motion animation, 20′–21′
Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Visual Culture Research Center, and RIBBON International for the Kyiv Biennial 2025.
Co-produced with steirischer herbst ’25.
This stop-motion animation film follows two figures: a soldier on the front line and a cow from an industrial dairy farm. After explosions, the two characters gain a sense of freedom: the cow breaks free from the truck taking her to the slaughterhouse, and the soldier, wounded, is abandoned by his brothers-in-arms. Another character in the film is the soil. Exhausted by war and industrial agriculture, the soil is a living entity, the home of many and the ground under their feet, which has been stolen by humans for resources. It is also a territory to fight back. As a materially produced animation, the film proposes restoring or modeling the organic world with artificial materials, thus recreating in miniature the work of nature and destruction.