Gallery Thaddaeus ropac presents Chamber Music, an exhibition, open until 24 February, of installations by conceptual artists Ilya ed Emilia Kabakov. Of Russian and American origin, they are recognized today as the most significant international artists to emerge in the late XNUMXth century.
Exhibited today in the Marais Gallery, the work is renewed. Emilia Kabakov says that this installation: “talks about a person who cannot escape the fears, problems, oppression of everyday life. We hope that today, in Paris, despite all the fears and insinuations of politics, this work, being so poetic, will once again be accepted and enjoyed.”
At the center of the installation, a paper fly hangs from the ceiling. Twelve empty chairs and backing tracks are arranged in a circle around it.
Each stand contains a blank sheet of colored drawings and Russian texts, translated into English. Some even include sheet music. Everything seems to point towards the motionless fly, which acts as a focal point, directing our gaze upwards and orchestrating our movements. A continuous sound of classical music emerges from an undefined source. It contains abstract notes, evoking the viewer into a state of anticipation, as if waiting for a concert to begin.
The fascination with the parasitic nature of the fly and its corresponding anthropomorphic qualities has long gripped artists; the fly is a recurring character and concept throughout their work. For them, the concept of the fly is as volatile as the fly itself. Concert for a Fly (Chamber Music) is an example of a “total installation”, a term coined by Ilya Kabakov. Art historian Oskar Bätschmann, in the catalog of raisonné artists, describes them as encyclopedic constructions that can be inserted, inviting and enticing the viewer to become an active participant. Even though the space is fully occupied by the installation, the viewer is left with a sense of illusion and a lingering feeling of emptiness. This suspended state is a recurring theme throughout their work.
Then a second installation takes us to another room for Concert For A Fly (1993), accompanied by a musical arrangement by Joseph Morag. The room contains a used toilet with a single vintage light bulb. Crumbling walls and old paint jobs surround a window that looks out into space. A multitude of flies swarm around the window, congregating around the soundtrack of "A Fly Symphony", resting on the solitary lectern and contributing to the general feeling of melancholic neglect.
The Fallen Chandelier (1997), a situation between these two installations, surprises us. The chandelier has clearly snapped from the electric wire and crashed to the floor, a sound of crystals clinking fills the space.
It talks about the transitory nature of functionality, the absence or disappearance of practical objects and their re-materialization as phantom presences. “What happened here?”: An unexpected catastrophe, clearly out of the ordinary, which uses the sudden inertia of the fascinated visitor to jolt himself out of the everyday and into a state of thought and intrigue.
In recent years, Paris has been as crucially important to the Kabakovs as Strange City during Monumenta at the Grand Palais in 2014. While their work is deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context in which the Kabakovs came of age, their work has reached the universal importance. Their large-scale projects include the Russian pavilion at the 45 1993th Venice Biennale, the documenta IX Kassel, Germany 1992, and the Grand Palais' Monumenta 2014 The Strange City which traveled to Shanghai's Powerstation in 2015.
