Ilya Kabakov, qui accepte encore volontiers le qualificatif obsolete d’artiste sovietique, est autant l’archeologue d’une epoque revolue que le temoin d’une histoire collective non resolue. Le passe proche dont il nous entretient mele etroitement ironie et nostalgie dans des <<installations>> qui hesitent toujours entre analyse critique et communion participative. Kabakov plante ainsi des decors pour une scene qui raconte a la fois une histoire, son histoire et l’Histoire. Chaque fois, les destins collectifs et personnels, fictifs et reels, se telescopent dans un recit qui temoigne de l’environnement psychologique et materiel, public et prive, de l’homo sovieticus. Le scenario des quelque

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A comprehensive examination of Russian art of the 1990s has been overdue. The Kraftemessen project was created to compensate this. The curators, Margarita Tupitsyn, Boris Groys and Victor Misiano, provide three different interpretations of post-Soviet visual culture. The list of the people involved in the realization of this project includes — among others — Haralampi G. Oroschakoff (the concept), Johanna zu Eltz (the project co-ordinator), and Diana von Hohenthal (of Hohenthal and Littler Gallery in Munich). Oroschakoff also curated the show at the Academie der Bildenden Kunste, where viewers became acquainted with the works of Ivan Chuikov, Nikita Alekseev, Konstantin

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Le Musee des Beaux-Arts du Havre presentait une exposition regroupant une centaine d’oeuvres sous le theme de la transparence. Elle abordait avec gourmandise peinture, sculpture, architecture et photographie et etendait ses recherches de 1914 a 1980, de Bruno Taut a Jean Nouvel, en passant par Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp, Hans Haacke, Dan Graham ou Julio Le Parc. On pourra regretter l’immanquable arbitraire de leur selection, ou encore la legere confusion de l’accrochage, toutefois l’ensemble definit une premiere approche honnete et juste de la question de la transparence, dont la souplesse essentielle autoriserait peut-etre une lecture singuliere de l’esthetique du XXe siecle. Si

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This installation by Genevieve Cadieux brought to mind an observation made by Margaret Atwood in her classic study of Canadian literature, Survival. She wrote that Canadian poets, particularly poets writing in French in Quebec, seem acutely interested in “what goes on inside the coffin.” Inside Cadieux’s twelve-foot-long trapezoid-sided glass sarcophagus, entitled Broken Memory, was nothing but empty space, and on the floor, tangles of electrical wiring leading to sound speakers enclosed at each end of the structure. From these speakers emanated cries of female distress that were both horrifying and mesmerizing. At times these moans were one register away from

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Vern Hume and Don Stein’s CD-ROM installation, Undiscovery, is a multimedia database that deals with the discovery and subsequent colonization of Banff, and explores the park area in the context of changing perceptions of space, movement and identity brought about by advances in digital technology and tendencies toward globalization. Rather than drawing borders, this experience involves an active trajectory between places, identities and social formations. Undiscovery embodies a peculiarly twentieth-century preoccupation with art and revolution playing themselves out in a realm of amusements and commodities. Constructed like an interactive video arcade game, the software invites “cyber-explorers” to navigate their own

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