Nikita Kadan. Protection of Plants, 2014; collage; 15 1/2 x 21 1/2 in. (39.5 x 54.5 cm). Courtesy the Artist and Waterside Contemporary, London.

The show is divided into three bodies of work that thematically intersect. Pulling from centuries of peasant farming traditions, Kadan ties the show together with the vegetable, using it as a symbolic motif of healing. This is most evident in a series of framed collages, Protection of Plants (2014), that are the strongest pieces in the show. Each piece consists of a photograph of a building visibly damaged from a military assault, with illustrations of vegetables layered over the image. The photographic style has the feel of a snapshot; it’s very much about the present condition. The illustrations’ origins are not offered, but from their washed-out, ethereal style, it’s obvious that they all come from the same pre-digital book. The vegetables, carefully extracted from their constructed context, float evenly over the image and randomly obscure parts of the picture. There is no attempt to blend or make it appear that the two layers go together visually or conceptually. The idealized plant and brutalized present exist separately but together. It’s as though Kadan is constructing a situation in which each of the original context’s failures are exposed through the failure of the new construction—each plane gains strength from the honesty of their union.

Nikita Kadan. Limits of Responsibility, 2014 (detail); 36 color slides; dimensions variable. Courtesy the Artist and Waterside Contemporary, London.

The history of the Ukrainian people is one of agriculture and resistance. Farming meant that one could live and mostly continue with cultural traditions no matter which neighboring regime was in power. The Soviet eras were particularly brutal, first with Stalin’s artificial famine to punish the resistance against “farm-collectivization” and later with the catastrophe of Chernobyl. However devastating these developments, Kadan doesn’t entirely dismiss the ideology of Soviet propaganda. Instead he uses it to absurdist effect by conceptually layering the past and present in his trophy piece Limits of Responsibility (2014). In the gallery’s back corner, a slide projector shows images taken by Kadan from last year’s student revolt and encampment in Kiev’s city square. The thirty-six images revolve around the student-appropriated dirt patches in the town square that had been turned into city-garden monuments. To farm is to resist. To match this image of revolt, Kadan re-created a sculpture from instructions found in a Soviet pamphlet on presenting agricultural achievements. It is an exact replica of the line drawing from the midcentury brochure. What is absent is any reference to the propaganda that would have hung on the panels. This leaves the stark white panels to dominate not only the accompanying planter, complete with growing vegetables, but also the entire show itself. The framework originally made to communicate ideas becomes the monument that embodies a failed ideal and offers a new foundation for an exit plan to the future.

Nikita Kadan. Untitled, 2014; watercolor on paper; 15 1/2 x 22 1/4 in. (39.5 x 56.5 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and Waterside Contemporary, London.

The third body of work consists of a series of untitled watercolors that depict relics—bones and neoclassical Soviet buildings—merged with plant matter. They are understated in their delicate line quality, and a muted color scheme compounds their incongruous subject matter. Each drawing comes off as a cooperative protest with the past, present, and future participating. It’s a fantasy rooted in a place where all constructs of hope have been controlled for too long; a retreat to idealism can no longer be about the future. The watercolors are funny in both senses of the word, and it’s not an inviting fantasy. They achieve exactly what they set out to do: They are austere in both palette and prospect.

Nikita Kadan. Limits of Responsibility, 2014; installation view, Waterside Contemporary, London. Courtesy of the Artist and Waterside Contemporary, London.

Limits of Responsibility pulls from the region’s harsh difficulties of the present and offers a model of the future from what is possible—that which has already occurred. This may seem a bleak outcome to the Western European and New World psyches of extravagant possibilities, but here lies a powerfully beautiful message in tangible outcomes. By selecting what works from the past while accepting the present, Kadan limits the ever-illusive grand notions generated by hope and presents a model of a sustainable future that could actually be achievable.

Nikita Kadan: Limits of Responsibility is on view at Waterside Contemporary, London, through April 4, 2015.

Long Ago and Not True Anyway, installation view, Waterside Contemporary. Slavs and Tatars, Self-Management Body, 2013; Silkscreen, cross-stitching, cotton; 6 x 28.5 x 5.5 cm. Slavs and Tatars, Triangulation (Not Kalingrad Not Kerbala), 2011; Concrete, paint. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Taking the exhibition’s thesis most directly, the collaborative group Slavs and Tatars claims a spurious (though not necessarily absurd) parallel between the Polish Solidarity movement Solidarność and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. This is history of the imagination, though it is not without purpose: the history of each movement is used as a means by which to understand the other, highlighting similarities where one may at first see culturally—and thus, perhaps, totally—separate events. In Self-Management Body (2013), a vaguely ominous statement of bureaucratic democracy appears silkscreened in both English and Polish across an Iranian pattern. Beside it, the low wedge-shaped sculpture Triangulation (Not Kaliningrad Not Kerbala) (2011) abstractly unites geography, through precise negation, by indicating a common point where the two cities are not. In both works, Slavs and Tatars composes work around cultural claims, drawing focus to the newly figured space between histories.

Mekitar Garabedian. MG, 2006 (still); Video; 2:05. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

The less imagined—though no less abstract—effects of movement between cultures are explored on a personal level in the work of Mekhitar Garabedian. In Garabedian’s short projected video MG (2006), the artist makes a tilted homage to the French New Wave film The 400 Blows (1959), performing the film’s powerful scene wherein the hero, Antoine Doinel, repeats his name into a bathroom mirror, again and again, as if to summon himself into being by will alone. Garabedian performs this same ritual, only here the artist alternates between two dialects, switching his pronunciation in turns, as if perpetually unsure which construction of self to summon. Behind this projection, twelve photographs hang in six frames, each displaying interiors of the home in which Garabedian was raised. In this work, titled Gentbrugge (1998–2009), the artist is again figured as a subject in diptych, dislocating the seeming certainty of both memory and identity within migratory experience.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The Lebanese Rocket Society: A Carpet, 2013; Carpet, documents. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Much of cultural experience comes in the form of narratives and the objects that prove these narratives, a reality explored by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s The Lebanese Rocket Society: A Carpet (2012). Along the gallery’s south wall, the collaborative team has arranged twelve columns of documentation on various projects funded by the American people in Lebanon, including a history of the massive eighteen-by-twelve-foot rug woven by over four hundred Armenian orphans between 1924 and 1925 in Ghazir and sent along with two of these orphans to the United States in 1926 for presentation to President Calvin Coolidge. Before this display lies a massive carpet of nearly the same dimensions, installed at a slight upward angle and showing a gigantic version of a found 1960s-era Lebanese stamp promoting the nation’s space program—a program somehow all but absent from Lebanon’s recorded history. Inverting the relation of object to narrative, the artists present an object that proves an unknown story and, in doing so, seems to beg its audience for a history, much as it has compelled Hadjithomas and Joreige.

Rabih Mroué. Shooting Images, 2013; Video; 9:15. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Two other works round out the show: Rabih Mroué’s Shooting Images (2013), a re-staging of footage shot by a Syrian civilian in Homs in which a sniper suddenly appears and fatally shoots the cameraman, and Libia Castro and Ólafus Ólafsson’s Your Country Doesn’t Exist—Do It Yourself (UK) (2013). Both works deal with staging and re-staging and the potential power of such gestures, though Mroué’s film turns toward the technologically fantastic possibility of recognizing the cameraman through the reflection in his killer’s eyes, while Castro and Ólafsson turn toward the willingness of a guest painter to alter or execute a prepared painting of the words “Your country doesn’t exist.” As each is a current or former national diplomat, the gesture is not without weight.

Libia Castro and Ólafus Ólafsson. Your Country Doesn’t Exist—Do It Yourself (UK), 2013; Mixed media, pen drawing and acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Waterside Contemporary

Throughout Long Ago and Not True Anyway, historical narratives are exposed to the familiar flux of personal memory. Intersecting the past of nations and places, subjective experiences open spaces of possibility, giving creative insight into the fragility of history.

Long Ago and Not True Anyway is on view at Waterside Contemporary, in London, through October 26, 2013.