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For Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, utopia is something that's been lost, particularly in their memories of the Soviet Union. The Russian artist couple, who live in New York, have installed their Gesamtkunstwerk Where is our place? in the elegant rooms of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, where, according to the concept, people can get together with giants and dwarves ( images). Here, the museum setting is transformed into "total theater" (Kabakov), a melancholic journey in time: as an homage to the 19th century, larger-than-life pants legs are standing before oversized picture fragments jutting out of a crack in the ceiling, gold-framed quotes from bourgeois salon painting: the overwhelming past that continues to force itself into the present's gaze. In contrast, tiny landscapes with abandoned villages are let into the floor as a model of "a world we can know nothing about because it withdraws from our perception, like the future." At eye level, on the other hand, the viewer is confronted with photographs from the eighties –everyday Socialist life, idyllic military scenes, culture, and technology in the early phase of Perestroika. For Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, this series of images is nothing more than proof of time's ephemerality, already as long forgotten as the Czarist Russia of the oil paintings. Thus, although all three layers overlap like a historical puzzle, the corresponding worlds nonetheless remain separate from one another. In a gentle and slightly sentimental way, Where is our place? tells us that even our own personal standpoint is not spared from transience in the memory's general "allover."
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