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We Know Nothing
6.8 x 5.8 x 5.8 feet; cement, wood, metal
2024
“Elena Kalkova has cast her mother’s kitchen in concrete. There is a history of artists meticulously recreating a space they deeply know to access the invisible spaces within them in hopes of arriving at a kind of Heideggarian truth or understanding– such as Liza Lou, Rachel Whiteread, and Ed Keinholz.. For Kalkova, this choice to reinterpret the kitchen and make it permanent has multiple interpretations, but unlike other sculptors who have restaged space, her work is about seeing the fracture of social ties and the barriers that are then between us in that space. Kalkova produces objects that act like stuck memory. The language of cupboards, silverware, and sinks are now perpetuated into something infinite; before they are able to be clouded by what has been lost to them. Hegel’s concept of aufheben may be useful here. As the concrete sublimates the idea of the kitchen, it negates itself–but also unearths what is below it. As it takes the real and translates it into a prop, it becomes a journey of the artist to feel what is lost in the transfer. It is broken as it becomes excavated.
Concrete is loaded with the directional look, the eyes trained towards the horizon and the future-looking aspirations of the political monument. While there are ways to relate Kalkova’s kitchen to the Soviet monument, it instead looks backwards. It’s restaging feels more to the purpose of restitution. It is a lost kitchen that once implied closeness; that began to shift out of focus as the political differences between the artist and her family became sharper and more defined. It then evokes a heartbreaking fossil, a tomb that reached to recover that intimacy of trust while understanding that its recreation only establishes it as a moment lost in time. Lost within the immutable gray and forever out of its reach are the conversations that made it feel like home in the first place.”
Exhibition text by Andrew Paul Woolbright, Editor-At-Large, Brooklyn Rail