It is a shame that Ilya Kabakov was not feeling well enough to make the trip to Tokyo for the opening last Friday of his Mori Art Museum exhibition, "Where Is Our Place?" I met the New York-based Kabakov and his wife, Emilia, years ago when they were involved with the now-defunct Satani Gallery in Ginza, and they are the sort of people -- conceptualists with a sense of humor -- who make the contemporary art world a warmer, friendlier and more "human" place. We missed you Ilya, get well soon.
"Where Is Our Place?" is a collaborative installation by Ilya (b. 1933) and Emilia (b. 1945) that shares the Mori's lower floor with a concurrent exhibition by the 35-year-old Vietnamese-Japanese video artist Jun Nguyen- Hatsushiba. Both shows opened May 28.
Upon entering the roughly 700-sq.-meter room that houses the bulk of the Kabakovs' installation, viewers are confronted by three scales of space. The first, a natural scale, involves some 130 works, all 50 × 64 cm, presented at eye level. Framed in standard art-gallery black, the works juxtapose black-and-white photographs on the left side of the frame with equal-size text on the right. The pictures are found snapshots and news-style photographs from the former Soviet Union, while the texts, also appropriated, are romantic poetry. (Though there are 130 pictures here, there are only 87 poems, so some of the poems appear two or more times.)