M HKA Ensembles

° 1977

Ives Maes has been working for several years around the notion of a 'Recyclable Refugee Camp', a biodegradable living unit following the regulations of the U.N.H.C.R., researching with a healthy dose of irony the capacity of art to intervene in the world. Over the last years his research has been focused on the relicts of World Fairs, often dilapidated remnants of outdated utopias.
His survey of all of these left overs since 'The Great Exhibition of all Nations and Industries' in London in 1851, was published in 2013 in a book to the occasion of his exhibition in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Ives Maes visited VDNKh several times before and even his not so old photographic observations became historical already, with images of the central pavilion still divided in split levels and housing wax puppets of the likes of the presidents Medvedev and Putin, pop singers or leaders like Stalin, Hitler and Napoleon. His work in VDNKh consists of stereoscopic images in which past and present overlap in a lot of sameness and some difference, taking photos from exactly the same angle as earlier photos had been taken from.