‘This is our reality’: the Ukrainian artist putting bomb-blasted roads in a gallery

Some artists use paintbrushes. Zhanna Kadyrova uses an AK-47. And for her latest show, she braved unexploded mines to turn the shrapnel-hit roads of a formerly occupied town into astonishing artViewed from a distance, Zhanna Kadyrova’s latest works might seem like abstract and very heavily impastoed paintings. Close up, however, they soon reveal themselves for what they are: sizeable rectangles of asphalt – actual bits of road – pitted and scarred from violent showers of shrapnel.These slices of road surface, complete with traces of white lines, come from Irpin, the commuter town on the western fringes of Kyiv occupied by the Russian troops last year – and the scene of some of the worst fighting in the early days of the full-scale invasion. After the town’s liberation, and with the permission of the mayor, Kadyrova had these chunks cut out of the street. “They are readymades,” says the artist, in her low, throaty voice as we sit in the autumnal sun outside her studio in Kyiv, part of a