Thinking About Ice & Fire — The Interplay of Resilience and Transformation

Q&A with Peter Doroshenko (Dalllas Contemporary)

2021•07•08

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The new installation by Nadia Kaaba-Linke shines a spotlight on the seemingly endless process of ‘remont’, a Ukrainian term for ‘renovation’ or ‘maintenance’. The artist used thousands of bricks along with wall installations to highlight how repairs are often of poor quality, behind schedule and chaotically organized. The show at the IZOLYATSIA cultural platform runs until January 12, 2020.

In an interview with UATV, Nadia Kaabi-Linke explains more about her inspiration behind the installation, the idea of a borderless world and her strong ties to Ukraine.

Abstract

The short Q&A highlights NKL’s optimism during the pandemic lockdown. Through recent and ongoing projects, she reflects on humanity’s capacity for adaptation and transformation while exploring renovation as a metaphor for resilience and the potential for collective action to address global challenges.

What did your most recent institutional exhibition in Kyiv focus on and why?

The title of this exhibition in Kyiv, which I started working on in late 2019, was Remont. The word is a Ukrainian expression for renovation and reconstruction. The exhibition was an interactive noise installation made of loosely arranged granite paving stones. The missing grout that usually stabilizes the stones was reproduced with plaster that formed a grid hanging on the walls. The pavers were laid out on the entire floor of the gallery, which was also the passage to enter the print lab, the cafeteria, the shop, and the toilets. When someone was heading to or leaving either of these places, it sounded as if the industrial building from the Soviet era had gritted its teeth. The missing mortar between the stones caused the wobbling of the stones, which produced the noise. The viewer was hence forced to walk through the unstable floor with an underlying feeling of insecurity, while the solution to this problem of the moving pavers was dysfunctionally hanging on the wall where it became just an object to look at. 

Many people in Ukraine use the expression “remont” for more than just the process of renovation. It also became a metaphor to describe the current status quo. Life seems to be stretched from a past with Soviet system bugs towards a future pulled by innovations and the emergence of a digital economy. It always baffles me that the internet and the digital standards in Kyiv are so much faster and higher than in Berlin, while the wires making this possible are hanging loose in the backyards. After getting involved in renovation works myself, I understood that remont is more than just a temporary intervention; it is a modus operandi with an open end. Things get repaired by breaking other things that get repaired by breaking something else. It’s an ongoing process that materializes in the sarcophagus in Chornobyl and in the loose wires in my backyard. It proliferates in society and appears in minor problems and historical turning points.

But it seems to be even more than that. It is a human condition, too. Now we understand that blowing fossil emissions into the atmosphere puts the survival of the human species at risk, and we started to look out for renewable energy while ignoring that clean energy comes in dirty since its infrastructure can only be established with the cost of continued exploitation of natural resources. What begins with the remont of an apartment extrapolates to the country and finally to the whole planet.

 

Remont may be a name for the human condition, which is to adapt to a problem rather than solve it.

Another unexpected microcosm for this human condition is the depot of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) in Kyiv, where I have the immense privilege and honour to produce a site-specific solo exhibition based on research about and intervention with the rich museum’s collection. This collection is a material record of Ukrainian history from Tsarist times until today. I am interested in works that do not belong to the canon of art history, and I am fortunate to meet a highly skilled, supportive, and encouraging team of experts at the museum. Each work is a witness of historical events; it tells a story about the circumstances of its creation, the fate of its author, and obscure and unusual ways it found a place within the collection. In short, it tells how it was stored, hidden, damaged, censored, partly destroyed, and so on. The question of what art was and was not was reviewed by each new regime. Post-revolutionary art dismissed artworks of the Tsarian era and then came Stalin, the De-Stalinization, and so on. Each subsequent regime (empire, revolution, totalitarianism, soviet republic, and the post-soviet republic) overwrote the history of the previous, and the first field affected by those appropriations is art and culture. The museum’s collection archives material testimonials of critical episodes and traumata, and it also reminds me of a state of remont in which some things get better while many others get worse.

What is your next project, and what are you researching for it?

I am working on various projects of different scales that I am equally committed to: two works in public space (one permanent), a solo exhibition at the National Museum in Kyiv, and many other projects. However, three ongoing projects are very timely. One project was conceived in 2019. It is a permanent floor sculpture reflecting the notion of mobilization (motion or movement or mobility) under static conditions. Formally, it brings together the daily cycle of the sun and moon shadows which I consider symbolic elements of the two timekeeping systems, the lunar- and solar-based calendars. The idea behind this merge of two temporal cultures is that the world fits together as one whole, meaning that there is little need for separation but very much reason for collaboration and unity. Furthermore, the figure of motion in stationary mode provides a poetic metaphor for our current situation. Thinking of change and making a change still seem to be two disconnected options. There is no reason to separate a problem from its solution, as in my experience, recognizing and acknowledging a problem is already a step towards solving it. That is so much better than denying that there were any problems. Currently, there is much talk about global issues, and some people start to panic while other move to action. It is a good sign that gives a lot of reasons to drop the ever-successful doomsday narratives. Another point to keep my optimism alive is born out of my frustration that good things are not always followed by beneficial outcomes, which translates into the fact that bad things don’t always make things worse. Even the pandemic showed that people are ready to act against their own individual interests in order to achieve a broader collective benefit. We also learned that even a shutdown of the economy does not mean a total standstill. On the contrary, new formats and platforms for public exchange emerged, and many people became involved in new community projects and much more. In this regard, the metaphor of motion in stationary mode might also reflect that there is no absolute stasis or stagnation. Something is always happening; people do not stop creating value because they are not forced to go to work. In this regard, the pandemic delivered key insights into our ability to solve existential problems. Things will work out. This requires a global commitment and the collaboration of all cultures, societies, and states. If there was one good thing to learn from the pandemic, it may be that this is not impossible.

How much do political issues influence your thinking and work?

Politics has an impact on my work, but it is not deliberate. I am not following a specific agenda and don’t have a mission to bring forward through my work. Often, I understand the political aspects of my work long after it was first shown. There is, instead, something like an inner necessity that arises out of the context of past works or new ideas. However, this inner call is always embedded and affected by political, social, and historical contexts. Like most other people I read the news, I listen to the radio (a lot of radio), and I am never indifferent to what I hear, see, and read. Also, my work is often about history (that is, as such, politically organized and presented) and situated in cities with individual urban realities. For this reason, political issues are a quasi-natural element of my work, especially since I often focus on contradictions within modern societies.  My working process is all about bringing invisible aspects to light, and these hidden realities are most likely hidden due to past and ongoing discrimination and oppression. But this does not mean that I am searching for something or intending to establish a certain rightfulness. I am not a judge, and I never start working with a political intention in mind. I am rather interested in peeling the onion of reality. It is a very beneficial process; wherever one starts, a new layer is always shining up. It is an ongoing and open process, and if I had to choose one political signature for my work, it would be to keep this as it is, open and unpredictable.

What have you been reading, and how does that affect your current direction?

I am not a fast reader, but I read many books at once. One book that I have always in mind, especially now in times of an unparalleled lockdown of the global economy, is Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 where he wrote that the ultimate revolutionary act of our times would simply be to get extensively more sleep and consume less. I cannot determine whether that book has an effect on my work, but if the people in the Global North limit themselves a bit, the Global South would probably have better chances to fight manufactured poverty. I am also interested in different projections of a possible future, most of them picturing a post-growth, non-capitalist and more spiritual society. I started to read about these possible transitions during my field research in Jordan for my latest solo project A Matter of Resilience at Darat al Funun. Walking through downtown Amman, I found an empty plot where an old steel fence held by rocks, a cable and a branch marked the property. I became interested in this absurd installation and heard the urban legend of a family that deliberately demolished their house. It was told that the late father of the woman appeared to her in a dream and told her about a treasure of gold buried under the house. In the end, the house was gone, but no treasure was found. Due to a new urbanization plan, the property was now considered too narrow to rebuild the same house. I think that the context of many things I was reading, including the theories about a transition and shift of the world, let me understand this story as a parable of capitalism and its inner urge for resource-wasting growth. The focus on profit destroys the planet, which is the home of all people. Later, I included the fence in my exhibition. It is part of a video installation called “Das Kapital – Epilogue. A Fable about the End of an Era”, which is a reference to the last volume of Das Kapital, edited and published by Engels after Karl Marx’s death where the attention was drawn to the negative environmental effects of increasing industrial productivity. In this book, he also famously claimed not to be a Marxist.

Written

Keywords
↳ Resilience, Transformation, Sustainability

Links
Q&A Dallas Contemporary
dc-from-home (Q&A Series)
resilience
post carbon institute