M HKA Ensembles

Photography, variable dimensions.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist.

From 2008 to 2013 Ives Maes photographed worldwide the architectural remains of World’s Fairs and the sites on which they were built, often revealing an ironic contrast between the grand utopian views of times past and the urban reality of today. On several occasions he photographed the site of the “All Union Agricultural Exhibition” that opened in 1939 and then became location of the Moscow Biennial.

After the collapse of the USSR the site became subject to deterioration. In 2009 Ives Maes registered the delapidated condition of these pavilions and its inhabitants; trinket shops and a wax museum in the Lenin Monument, a food market in the Montreal Expo 67 Soviet Pavilion, a rusty rocket in front of the Cosmos Pavilion and a disassembled Vera Mukhina sculpture that once stood atop the Soviet Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1937.

In 2013 he returned to record the reconstruction of the 1937 Soviet Pavilion with the restored “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” on top, holding hammer and sickle. This symbol of the Soviet epoch seemed to be an anomaly in time, to reappear an eighty years after its demolition. After 2013 a remarkable reintroduction of Soviet symbols has taken place, as well as a clean sweep of the exhibition grounds and a restoration of its grand architecture. In “Soviet Stereographs” archival images, personal photographs from 2009 and 2013 and new photographs from 2015 are juxtaposed through the use of stereoscopes. These images from different years blend together in order to form non-existing appearances of an in-between time. A moment between construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. A mediation of Communism, Capitalism and something undefined in-between.