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

The title of this exhibition in Kyiv that started 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. Each time when someone was heading to or leaving either of these places it sounded as if the industrial building from the Soviet era 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 became also a metaphor to describe the actual 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 as well in the sarcophagus in Chernobyl as well as in the loose wires in my backyard. But it is even more than that. It is a human condition. Now we understood that blowing fossil emissions in 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 on the country and finally on the whole planet. Remont is maybe a human condition to rather learn to live with a given problem than to solve it. 

Another unexpected microcosm for this human condition is the depot of the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, where I have the immense privilege and honor to produce a site-specific solo exhibition based on research about and the 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 extremely lucky 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, about the fate of its author, about obscure and unusual ways how it found a place in the collection; in short, it tells the story how it was stored, hidden, damaged, censored, partly destroyed, and so on. The question of what was art and what not was reviewed by each new regime, post-revolutionary art dismissed artworks of Tsarian era, then came Stalin and the De-Stalinization and so on. Each subsequent regime (empire, revolution or republic) overwrote the history of the previous, and the first field affected by those appropriations is art and culture. The museum’s collection is an archive of material testimonials speaking of critical episodes and traumata. It reminds me of making some things better through making others 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, (my next gallery solo in Kolkata) and many other projects. yet there are three ongoing projects that have very timely aspects. One project was conceived in 2019, it is a permanent floor sculpture reflecting on 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, which means that there is little need for separation but very much reason for collaborations. Furthermore, the figure of motion in stationary mode provides a poetic metaphor for our current situation. Thinking of change and actually making it still seem to be disconnected options. Yet there is a lot of reason to dismiss doomsday narratives. As good things are not only good, bad things like crises are not entirely bad. Even the Covid19 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 that everything stands still.  On the contrary, new formats and platforms for public exchange are emerging, people are 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 standstill, no absolute stasis. Something is always happening, people do not stop working just because they are not forced to. In this regard, the pandemic delivered key insights to our ability to solve existential problems. This requires a global commitment and the collaboration of all cultures, societies, and states. For a few months, we know that such a kind of commitment is possible. 

How much do political issues influence your thinking and work?

There is an impact of politics on my work, but it is not deliberately. I am not following a certain agenda, and I 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 rather something like an inner necessity that raises out of the context of past works or new ideas. However, this inner call is always embedded and affected by political, social, historical contexts. Like most other people I read the news, I listen to the radio (a lot) 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 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 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 as such, wherever one starts, always a new layer shows up. It is an ongoing and open process, and if I would have 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 directions? 

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 lock-down 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 I do think that if the people in the global north would limit themselves a bit the global south would probably have much more resources to fight poverty. I also am interested in different projection of a possible future, most of them picturing a post-growth and non-capitalist and maybe more spiritual society. I started to read about these possible transitions during my field research in Amman, Jordan, for my latest sole exhibition A Matter of Resilience at Darat al Funun. Walking through downtown Amman, I found an empty plot, where an old steel fence hold by rocks a cable and a branch marked the property. I got interested in this absurd installation and heard the urban legend about 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 in 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 on capitalism and its inner urge for a 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 Engel’s 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 acclaimed not to be a Marxist himself.   

about nadia kaabi-linke

Kaabi-Linke was born in Tunis in 1978, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tunis, and later at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

The art of Nadia Kaabi-Linke is related to places and their histories; it is as time-specific as it is site-specific. The installations and objects, as well as her pictorial works, are anchored in constellations of cultural and historical, social and political contexts and refer to a certain place or to coincidental events. Making use of many different media, artefacts, symbolisms and codes, her work is intertwined with socio-psychological topics: perception, memory, and geographically and politically constructed identities.

nadia kaabi-linke portfolio

@nadia_kaabi_linke_

‘remont’ exhibition website

‘remont’ review via c-print