Zhanna Kadyrova: The Forest

Award-winning Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova’s IHME Helsinki Commission 2025: The Forest is at the Power Plant Museum in Helsinki, Finland, until October 2, 2025. In this new work Kadyrova combines video, sound and camera-obscura photos with archival material. She examines the consequences of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russia in June 2023, the past and future of this region submerged under a reservoir, and nature’s capacity for renewal. As an exhibition venue the Power Plant Museum and Vanhankaupunginkoski dam bring these themes up for contemplation in the context of Helsinki.

“It is very important for me to create a connection to the local story, and since the city of Helsinki has decided to demolish this dam, it became an interesting link to the Kakhovka dam. I wanted to examine two different approaches to the decommissioning of energy infrastructure in parallel. Working in Zaporizhzhia and the support of the city of Zaporizhzhia have inspired me greatly, and I intend to continue working with this project,” is how Kadyrova describes the working process around the Commission.

The Commission has been in preparation for two years and has been realized together with partners in Ukraine: The Dovzhenko Centre film archive in Kyiv; the City of Zaporizhzhia; and the Khortytsia Museum. Numerous local people in the Zaporizhzhia region have also assisted Kadyrova.

Executive Director and Curator of IHME Helsinki Paula Toppila invited Kadyrova to be the artist for IHME Helsinki Commission 2025: “The main characters in Kadyrova’s Commission are two of our planet’s life-sustaining systems: forests and waterways. The third main character is humankind, whose actions have endangered both of these systems, not just in the case study presented in the Commission, but on a planetary scale. The Forest conveys a powerful image of a landscape, a nation, and humanity at a crossroads where the potentials for both utopias and dystopias exist simultaneously. Nevertheless, the unusual vitality of the forest depicted by Kadyrova also offers hope for reconstruction, both post-war and ecologically.”

Zhanna Kadyrova (b. 1981) was awarded the Ukrainian State’s Shevchenko National Prize for visual arts in March 2025 and will represent Ukraine at the 2026 Venice Biennale. IHME Helsinki is a contemporary-art commissioning agency that promotes the cultural change needed in the environmental crisis, and citizen’s ability to adapt to it. IHME Helsinki Commission is made possible by Saastamoinen Foundation, Kone Foundation and Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation.