A Tunis-born artist of Ukrainian origin, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, views repair and refurbishment as a “lifestyle” having to do with the Ukrainian mentality.
Kaabi-Linke says looking back at the country’s history with a “succession of crises and traumas, people have still never lost their lightness of being and (their) optimism.” She believes part of this comes from a work ethic developed with the ongoing activity of reparation.
“I felt like reparation or refurbishment is not just an act of doing something; it’s really a way of being, and I wanted to translate this in an exhibition.”
Kaabi-Linke’s new exhibit is an immersive installation titled “Remont.” It is a metaphor to “dig into the Ukrainian mentality,” she says.
She defines Remont this way, “When you see street repairs or Institutional problems … we repair them but we repair them in a way that they create other problems, which we then have to repair in a different way.”
Photos from Izolyatsia.org
The artist describes the world and the current state of things and explains how her work begins from there. The installation brings elements of the outside world into the gallery.
“So it’s a succession of things where we think, ‘OK we have really touched the bottom and it’s not possible that we can go any lower’ – and yet we still go lower,” Kaabi-Linke said.
In an attempt to create instability, Kaabi-Linke uses a shaky floor with cobblestones not connected to each other. The missing mortar is found on the wall, “I really wanted to separate the problem from the solution – in a way that we are looking at the solution. There, we see what we should do so that the floor will be stable,” she says.
Sometimes though, the artist says, we may stare at the solution like a theory or a painting, “but we don’t have the courage to make the right decisions in order to avoid this shaky situation in which we are in.”
“So, it’s as if we prefer to work on an unstable floor rather than taking the solution and putting it inside the floor, and therefore connecting the two.”
The “Remont” exhibit is being held at Izolyatsia from November 2019—12 January 2020.