C87 Review
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Children's Hospital, Irish Museum of Modern Art, November 1998-April 11, 1999
Is it eau de nil, green or blue? - that colour you see when you swim in the ocean open your eyes and look up to the surface.
The east wing of IMMA at Kilmainham has been transformed or perhaps returned to the realm of hospital. We are pointed towards the institutional, wading deeper into the space where the crisp white line meets the green of memory, at around elbow level.
There is the strange sense that the space had been vacated only moments ago: somewhere off in the distance I thought I heard a bendy scissors clink in one of those kidney-shaped dishes.
Gone were the brisk trolleys and white painted squeaking shoes. I found a familiar Ladybird book which had stood a lifetime behind the stretchy elastic in my primary-school library shelf. Here it lay on a bedside locker that had strayed into the main corridor. There had definitely been someone else here...
Eoin my six-year-old son enveloped himself in the white cotton curtain which acted as a hospital bed screen and confined a space like a stage. This 'private' space held a little grey bed, two chairs, presumably for visitors who might call, a bedside cabinet, and a strange little box theatre, drawn up alongside the bed. We both lay on the grey refugee blanket, neatly tucked over the vacant bed. Remnants of the wallpaper, strange little figures and flat areas of ice-cream colour filled the theatre conjured up in a hardboard box. Somewhere below a disconnected voice was telling us a story, reality was suspended, and we were lost, totally transfixed. We stopped looking at how those theatres were constructed. We travelled far into the narrative. Since entering the East Wing corridor my expectations had taken an athletic somersault, and landed us somewhere between magical and intriguing.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's quirky little theatres work on several levels: there is the issue of control and the sense of being watched, the refugee blanket and the vague scent of what was the Soviet Union. A hospital within a hospital, a theatre within a theatre, the patient and the visitor. I found that simple integrity more commonly seen in 'outsider' art. We can see, the manifestation of their own reality, and reference to the overwhelming human need for personal expression particularly in situations where the individual is disregarded.
Perhaps Eoin and I got far too involved in Repulsive George and that business with the fridge, the places with hidden coral reef under the water, 'miraculous' moments and extraordinary pirouettes. We left IMMA in the pelting rain, late on a Friday afternoon. Eoin re-enacted the callisthenics of the student in the attic, the whole way down the lane.
Yes there is something very large being said here, about the relevance of the use of and the need for art, in the last gasps of the twentieth century. As an artist engaged in the practice of making art, I feel it's the responsibility of the artist to make decisions on how we approach these major issues, individually within our work. It is exciting as an artist to visit a gallery and on entry have my expectations totally derailed - that, unfortunately, is because it so seldom happens. Here was an exhibition that went right to the heart of it; we are given access to that thread of pure creativity, stitched so beautifully across a child's mind; we are offered a chance to follow its tangle right back to the spool.
Rita Duffy is an artist based in Belfast.
The Children's Hospital was commissioned specifically for IMMA.
