The Palace of Projects: press coverage
The Architect's Journal, 2 April 1998
The Guardian, 24 March 1998:
“Ilya and Emilia Kabakovs Palace of Projects gleams in the gloom of London’s Roundhouse. A spiralling, luminous edifice of translucent walls, it is a truncated Tower of Babel, a geometric snail’s shell of timber and fireproofed white fabric. The palace rises toward the pinnacle of the old railway turntable shed – designed by Robert Stephenson – glowing with light and the aura of bright ideas […]
“The palace is an extremely odd installation. One is invited to sit and read, to ponder models and mock-up rooms, to climb the stairs toward an unattainable heaven. It is a series of glimpses of frustrated lives and mad plans. The palace is farcical but each project in it has been thought through as if it were real, as if it were true. As much as Kabakov’s projects are funny, they are treated in such a deadpan way that the humour leaves one with a lingering sense of the tragic, of frustrated creativity, of the necessity to make life bearable by any means.” (Adrian Searle)
The Observer, 29 March 1998:
“Comparisons between Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Palace of Projects and the Millenium Experience are cheap and irresistible. At Greenwich there are to be spiritual rides and plastic statues with visitor centres lodged inside them like colossal non-biodegradable suppositories. In the Roundhouse, at an infinitesimal fraction of the cost, we have a whimsical extravaganza commissioned by Artangel and involving nothing more technically advanced than a slide carousel that, at a pinch, they could have done without.” (William Feaver)
Financial Times, 31 March 1998:
“The Kabakovs, survivors of the Soviet Utopia know better than most both the liberating power and the potential danger of the human imagination.” (Lynn Macritchie)
Frieze:
“However ludicrous Kabakov’s invented figures and situations might seem, they are based on daily life. Moreover, in the tradition of the 19th century novel, humour and pathos are interwoven. The result is mock-documentary involving people trying to come to terms with nature and the universe, and offering proposals for bettering their own lives and those of others. The result resembles a website visited regularly by geniuses and madmen, all with suggestions of their own. Why aren’t the heavens illuminated night after night simply to inspire us? Why can’t we relieve our bowels in holes dug on the sides of hills, which offer a chance to answer a call of nature and enjoy the beauties of the landscape at the same time? Why not start a choir which would stroll the streets singing?” (Stuart Morgan)
The Architect’s Journal, 2 April 1998:
“Running through the history of twentieth-century art is the dichotomy between formalism and realism: whether art needs conceits and conventions to convey some meaning or emotion, or whether it really can be a seamless continuum with ‘everyday’ life. Nowhere was this division more hotly contested than in the Soviet Union, where a natural propensity for philosophising became embroiled with the contradictory revolutionary imperatives for art to be comprehensible and to shed its bourgeois traditions.
“‘The Palace of Projects’, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s exhibition organised by Artangel at the Roundhouse, is full of knowing references and a few subconscious echoes of this maelstrom. The title recalls the Palace of the Soviets, a competition whose outcome – a piece of Stalinist baroque rather than Le Corbusier – ended starry-eyed hopes that the Soviet Union would back the avant-garde. And if stripped of its filmy walls, the circular installation might resemble Tatlin’s tower. Moving into the subconscious – where the most interesting territory of this exhibition lies – the most prevalent theme is a sense of the samizdat, of things not being quite as they seem: of secret lives.”
Art/Text 62, 1998:
“There are many layers of irony to ‘The Palace of Projects’ in the sense that it contains innumerable points of ambivalent self-reflection, but the grandest of these ironies is that the enterprise intends to stand above the particularity and idiosyncrasy of all the projects it contains, to transcend the imprisonment of each ‘author’ within his or her own particular project by cataloguing and classifying them. This turns out to be one of the most obsessive and impracticable projects of all. For Jorge Luís Borges, the world was akin to an infinite library; for the Kabakovs, it ‘consists of a multitude of projects, realized ones, half-realized ones, and [one] not realized at all.’ Somewhere or other, each crosses the line between the reasonable and the obsessive, the constructive and the maniacal.” (Barry Schwabsky)