NEW YORK.-Windows at the Kimmel Center, New York University is pleased to present: Irina Nakhova: Disagreeable Matters – Disarming Icons, May 3 - May 29, 2007 an exhibition curated by Kalliopi Minioudaki Living and working mostly in New York since the 1990s, Irina Nakhova has been an influential yet neglected member of the younger generation of the Moscow Non-Conformists. Having begun as an underground painter of surrealist abstraction in the early seventies, she is best known for a series of ephemeral transformations of her government room through collage and painting (in the early 1980s) –a founding instance of Russian Conceptualism’s signature “total installations.”

In a gesture that defies the constitutive privacy and invisibility of Nakhova’s early artwork, which, as part of the Russian “underground,” was made as a dissident act of freedom that sought to resist the official “socialist” realism of the last phase of the communist regime and was meant to be privately consumed by a limited yet lively artistic milieu in domestic spaces, this exhibition turns the face of Nakhova’s centripetal installations toward New York’s mass public and renders “social” the pseudo-realism of two series of photographically-derived representations. Trading the ideally participatory consumption of Nakhova’s large-scale (and often interactive) multimedia installations for the passerby’s kinesthetic perception of the sequential unfolding of her Ironing Boards (2001) and Rehearsal (2003), this display also takes her work out of her recent isolation –within art institutions and as an artist in late capitalist freedom.

Ironing Boards and Rehearsal are brought together for their timeless yet also timely dialogue on disagreeable matters (death, violence, etc.) through seductive images and a more or less explicit flirtation with art history (including Manet, Man Ray, and even gothic architecture). While not representative of Nakhova’s total installations, they do exemplify her formalist penchant for repetition and difference in similarity as well as the conceptual polysemy of her subjects.

Rehearsal (2003) is a group portrait of everyday men and women in staged improvisations of the unperformable experience of death. Presented as light boxes, accumulated in a structure evocative of religious columbaria and irreverent screens, it is comprised of forty small photographic reenactments of Edouard Manet’s Dead Toreador (1864) oxymoronically brought to life through dim light. The uncanny intimacy of their smallness, the seemingly candle-lit aliveness of the skin, the everydayness of the sitters and their attributes, and the hypnotizing repetitiveness of the Toreador pose are only few of the factors that add to the perceptual and conceptual games that this theatrical portrayal of heroic mass deaths enacts. Through this photographic documentation of performances of death, Nakhova turns on its head the staged artificiality of Manet’s realism that largely relied on photography and literalizes Roland Barthes’ understanding of photography’s inherent dialogue with death, while also turning an homage to Manet into a treatise that questions issues such as originality and reproducibility, mass subjectivity and difference. Above all, presented in New York, where Nakhova lived until her studio was made uninhabitable after 9/11, Rehearsal can be seen as an ambiguous memorial to heroic and unheroic deaths in an era of all kinds of wars and terrors.

Ironing Boards (2001) is comprised of the photographs of seven semi-nudes in comparable yet different poses (further differentiated by lighting) printed on silk and mounted on common ironing boards. As a synecdochic group portrait or anti-portrait, Ironing Boards substitutes the face with the skin of the backs of its sitters. The metaphor of skin as an artistic surface underlies this doubling of surfaces, echoing the artist’s interest in the constructivist notion of faktura, yet substituting traditional painterly texture for its technological simulacrum. By printing a sensuous surface (skin) on contrasting supports (silk on soft padded boards and the metallic surfaces of four plugged-in irons) the artist unsettles the viewer’s sensorial experience of the body and its warmth. Flaunting skin as the real profundity of being (in the sense of Paul Valéry), Ironing Boards problematizes skin’s dichotomous theorizations as a boundary or a mirror of the soul as well as a surface where the decentered post-Descartian subject is mortgaged (David Joselit).

Nakhova presents the body as a sensuous yet unknown cartography scarred by natural and cultural markers (sunbathing marks, tattoos, cancerous moles), but with the signs of age and gender suggestively defamiliarized. The confinement of the figures, the self-imprisoning gestures of their hands, and the irons themselves suggest changing subtexts of violence, from the domestic to the military, but rather than rush to easy feminist interpretations, we should both remember that, for the artist, “home” was an “island of freedom,” as well as notice the quasi-religious framing of the body within an everyday object whose shape echoes that of the windows of gothic cathedrals.

Special thanks to the curator of the Kimmel Windows Jovana Stokic as well as Pamela Bolen, Eduardo Cadava, Despina Lalaki, John Tormey , Allison Unruh and the artist. Windows at the Kimmel Center, New York University Located on the corner of LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village, the Windows offer a 24-hour opportunity for viewing art.