Apartment exhibitions: In search for the spaces of authenticity

Abstract

Nowadays contemporary artists start to work on the representation of memory and history which leads them to the non-artistic spaces. Among such are the museums of conscience which provide the documents and evidences of the Holocaust, repressions, genocides, or places of memory, e.g. industrial ruins, where the history is dissolved in the landscape. Also, apartment exhibitions start gaining popularity again. However, the understanding of such spaces is quite different from Soviet underground artists, who used the apartment as a substitute of a gallery or an alternative to the white cube, creating a specific environment for showing the works. Artists distanced from the atmosphere of the place to focus on works they present. Nowadays this awareness is associated with the interest in personal memory and family history which the apartments tend to keep.

What do artists find so special in the apartment spaces? How do they work with the authentic artifacts and documents left there? And how can the exhibition space, where the artistic and documentary materials are mixed, be constructed? These questions can be considered on the example of the “Exhibition of things No. 2” that was organized in Moscow in 2020 and was curated by Elizaveta Spivakovskaya and Mikhail Kolchin. The exhibition took place in Spivakovskaya’s family apartment. It is divided into several parts devoted to particular periods in the family history, each located in different rooms focused on Spivakovskaya’s childhood in the 1990s and fragments of her father and grandfather’s life. The “Room No.2” is filled with the artworks which are made using the same materials and objects that are shown in the other rooms like toys and decals, yet this exact part allows us to shift the focus from the apartment to the exhibition space.

The exhibition gathers around the real objects which were found in the apartment to represent the memory of the family who once lived there. The visitors become inventors who discover the fragments of the past life so their role is transformed from the viewers to the active participants of the exhibition.