Where is our place?

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I
For the Venice Biennale of 2003, Russian artist Ilya Kabakov presented the installation that he realized with his wife Emilia, Where is our place?, a work that offers a vision from the experience of exile.

II
Although exile doesn’t necessarily give way to a form of nostalgia or to an idealization of the past, it is an experience that unhinges memory. An exile magnifies memories or obsessively transfers them towards the native land’s conflicts, as if attempting to perpetuate the personal history that was suddenly cut short. This is a way of countering one’s uprooting. The lost past becomes a promised land of sorts, a non-place to which one either cannot return or doesn’t wish to return. The exile embarks on a never-ending pilgrimage towards this non-place. Kabakov's installation suggests this magnification of the past.

III
Kabakov has hung enormous gold-framed paintings on the wall, setting them so high above the spectator’s gaze that they can only be perceived as distorted images. The gallery’s ceiling abruptly interrupts these paintings, as if that space were too small to accommodate them. At eye-level, the spectator can view an exhibit of smaller contemporary photographs, framed in black moldings and accompanied by the verses of Russian poets. Through the difference in size between each set of images, Kabakov presents the present as minuscule in comparison with the past.

IV
What is our place? can also be construed as a critique to contemporary art or, better yet, as a self-criticism. The paintings’ dimensions and their colors, as well as their high position emphatically assert a hierarchy in which the painted image of the past is endowed with greater value than the present’s photographic technique, since the latter requires the supplement of the poetic texts. Even if one disagrees with Kabakov’s traditionalist stance, Where is our place? offers a rare example of an installation of contemporary art that aspires to the consecration of that very same artistic heritage against which art has rebelled at least since the avant-garde’s emergence. It is an alternative mode of subversion in which the act of sedition actually reveres the nineteenth century, the object of most of the artistic irreverences of our times. It is a protest against protest that also becomes a self-critique since it is conceived and articulated through the visual language of the present.

V
Kabakov even added gigantic spectators, so tall that we can only see their shoes, their dresses and their pants’ hems. These sculptural spectators are the ones who can see the paintings hung so near to the ceiling. Where is our place? is also a critique of contemporary perception with its diminished capacity for aesthetic enjoyment. Kabakov uses the exile’s inability of ceasing to worship his own tradition to allow his spectators to perceive their separation from visual pleasure, another type of uprooting that isn’t limited to the separation from one’s native land. Kabakov reflects upon the present in which the aesthetic horizon of art tends to be diminished in favor of an ideological and technological dimension.