EIGHTEEN: WELCOME to Australia//3 days around Sydney Biennale

17th Sydney Biennale, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a precarious age

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Paul McCarthy, Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift I, 2009, Pier 2/3

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Sydney, 2010

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Rohan Wealleans, He with Glands of Wasp, detail, 2009, Cockatoo Island


photo Katya Grokhovsky, 2010, Sydney

photo Katya Grokhovsky, 2010, Sydney

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Shen Shaomin, Summit: Mao, 2009, Cockatoo Island


photo Katya Grokhovsky, Friendship?, Sydney, 2010

photo Katya Grokhovsky, 2010, Sydney, for your entertainment

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Cai Gou-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage one, 2004, Cockatoo island


photo Katya Grokhovsky, 2010, Sydney Tourist

photo Katya Grokhovsky, for your entertainment : part 2, 2010

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Roxy Paine, Neuron, 2010, in front of MCA, Sydney

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Slave Pianos, 2009, Cockatoo Island

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Angela Ellsworth, Seer Bonnets, Installation detail, 2009, MCA Sydney


photo Katya Grokhovsky, Cockatoo Island, Sydney Biennale, 2010

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Shen Shaomin, Summit: Lenin, 2009, Cockatoo Island

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Shen Shaomin, Summit: Fidel Castro, breathing still, 2009, Cockatoo Island

photo Katya Grokhovsky, Kader Attia, Kasbah, 2009, Cockatoo island


photo Katya Grokhovsky, Botanical Gardens, 2010, Sydney

drrrriiink in moderation: sings the man, Australian flag proudly behind him: welcome to OZ.
it'll hurt .I'll bleed. badly. scars? for life perhaps? need I feel everything so bodily, inside me? Angela Ellsworth's installation at the MCA: pearl pin bonnets: I watch on in silence: imaginary blood trickling down my face : Louise Bourgeois' bronze sweaters and red ink drawings, a vase with a dead bouquet of flowers inside it, stands lonely near her works.Christian Jankowski, Bill Viola, Biennale ferry to the Cockatoo Island, a former convict site. Oh Australia. I have never seen your convict sites. I want to learn. I am thirsty for your true dark veiled history, my adopted one. Russian aes+f group, Love it. A Requiem for Capitalism in digital format and 9 channel circular installation, Happiness Island is being built as we speak: yes, it is actually happening to all of us: enslaved hanged convict piano, bringing culture?, cars under the ceilings, fireworks fireworks, tin roofs of the poor, see? Deeper and faster I sink into fearful contemplation: the world is f.u.c.k.e.d.....Yvonne Todd's uncanny fake-toothy staged photo-performances, Yayoi Kusama singing her sad song on video, surrounded by mirrored dots and obsessions, she sings about antidepressants and greatness? fresh ocean air fills my lungs. Pier 2/3: Paul McCarthy's Ship of Fools is going nowhere and is adrift in the fatty over-consumption of empty idolisation of our age: hooray hooray hooray, Thank you Paul. We are: mentally ill-advised, deadly and overpriced. Welcome to here. Acrylic white paint on Aboriginal skin. Take a picture, take a picture: Just for you, Darling....

SEVENTEEN://SAN FRANCISCO and //onto down to Australia//

romantic gestures series, broken shoes left in NYC, photo Katya Grokhovsky, 2010

San Francisco? Windy and cold, heely and ....sightly bent, ultra -extra-unsure and exciting...I'm so cold, I have no clothes. I have no more feet. SFMOMA, hello Bubbles and Micheal, Bay area. It's very expensive to live here, apparently. Wattis, Tino Sehgal, do you like his work? yes, this is critique, Tino Sehgal, 2008. You got me, Tino. SFAI, opening, what a view. I've been here before, city lights, stinking rose and that bar...the heels make me nauseous.That curvy street, laughing hysteria, pull me up, it is almost parallel to my face, hugging trees, I am reminded of Melbourne, Adelaide, Odessa, Sydney, it reminds me of some streets in every city I know... Blueberries and Santina's pasta with cherry tomatoes, guilty chocolate cake. wow...shrimp in curry...too much liquid...blue bottle coffee...good. Berkley and Oakland, pleasant, the story of California, Californian, what is it? I walk uphill, running in my sleep all over the vastness of travel. sensing Australia. closer.
Onwards.

The planes don't fly out of San Francisco sometimes, this is the day. You see that fog, miss? Australia from LA : nearly missed, last to board, I am bumped up to premium economy class. It exists? yes.the food, the great sleep, the big leather soft chairs...movies, single man, education, amelia..sleep. I am here. parents' house. My right leg hurts badly and is swollen, I limp. we'll fix it all. I am wounded, coming home from a battle. self-inflicted wounds. breathe. one more time.I lie in bed smothered and pampered: foot on a pillow cushioned by mum and dad. Breakfast of Illy coffee and sirnki: mum's ricotta- pan- fried- little pan- cakes with cherry jam. Pickled tomatoes, russian style pickled mushrooms....mum's salted fresh salmon, potatoes with dill and butter, buckwheat and mushroom sauce, bullion, the chicken soup for my battered soul, Cognac with coffee and cake alenushka. mum at home. that feeling of mother nearby, food, care. blankets pillows, soft clean fresh. how much I crave this, how much I cannot be here. not long at all. areas of suburbia stretch in a lonely solitude...here, in Australia, the distance between people is one meter..did you know that? no idea. In Europe its 20 cm. I think in USA it's 6o...60 is perfect: not too far not too close.

Something is very tired in me. why me? what a strange question to your mother. maybe I won't make any art anymore. just immaterial , just this. thought and writing. I look lovingly through my library, those found painted shelves, splashes of bright paint, red, yellow with black and blue. that little studio in Melbourne, sharing it with him..fashion, tears and conservative ladies as clients. Roses from botanic gardens thrown onto your bed at night, crawling out. what love. to say an awful goodbye in Paris, that city you were supposed to love, at 25, to hate it so much: to never really claim it again for yourself. leave me alone. you are like a bull, you fear nothing, it might appear so, I fear lots. most of all? maybe death, perhaps. I shudder in sadness for all our future, for we share it, death. how curious. have you ever had that feeling, as a child you lay wide awake in bed and imagine yourself being dead, that nothing will ever be again...nothing. not this, not that, not tomorrow, not sleep, not food, not toilet, not mother not father not friends, no sounds no light. it is a loop of thought.killing you softly. nothing will ever again exist. nothing for you nothing of you.....fascinating.

I have seen dead people in open caskets in Ukraine as a child, carried through the courtyards, with a funeral orchestra behind and crowds of people following, some crying some jumping up to see the dead one...who is it and from which apartment? I closed windows, the march of death parading, celebrating, reminding. Always very old people in their Sunday best with lots of fresh flowers around their bodies...never pick up funeral flowers. And it's bad luck to see dead person, but how curious to see dead person. maybe I'll live to a 100? no. or maybe strong as a bull I'll last forever?

Waking up to a sudden change of Australian prime-minister. Witness to history? A first ever female PM. "Single, barren woman", oh boy....not chosen by the country...who will choose a woman? ...herself. ........three months before the election. The glass ceilings..the equal pay..the first FEMALE PM. There we go again and again and again..and again...and again...renew your wows of feminism to each other and stop right there. Reading newspapers. Is it 1982? still there still getting less pay still fighting still there still at it...stop right there....still ??????.

SIXTEEN: SAN JOSE //childhood and spicy coffee//

Katya Grokhovsky, San Jose, 2010

inner ability to not compromise,

you learn from your work not your life..

You shouldn't compromise.

San Jose: arrival: stay with old-time, Ukraine- time, childhood-time family friends.These people know me from birth.Once upon a time I grew up in Odessa, Ukraine. Side by side with a boy and girl and their parents. We shared our young lives, spent a lot of times together climbing trees and getting into general, common kid trouble. We looked after each other, we had no baby sitters, while our parents worked 9 to 5. We were happy and awaiting life. Eating green apricots and berries by large dirty handful to the point of extremely upset stomachs; house and guest under father's desk; be my guest, I'll make you a sweet cup of tea and ham and half-of-baguette sandwich, butter? yes, please. Playing a piano badly and with no interest, a piano, which both set of parents bought collectively and we all shared. Pink short cotton nightgown with small blue flowers on it; horizon of wheat and corn fields to freely run in, occasionally happily falling and scratching knees on the dry dusty dirt roads, bleached by the sun golden hair and dark bronze sweaty bruised skin; who can forget or not romanticize their childhood? It is inevitable. Gypsies? yes, they lived below us in an empty apartment, always coming and going. You were afraid? never. not of them. Others. Adults and their stale air of sometimes failed lives. I was afraid of them, I was afraid I will become like them.

Soft breeze through a chiffon curtain blowing hot wind onto my outstretched sleepy fatigued body on a large bed, white limousine outside, whose? Suburbia and soft. At rest. Simulacrum of some kind of home. where?

Russian style barbecue made by two Armenian men. Familiar. "Hysterical emotional Russian women".... I come from this. …spicy coffee …….she meets me in an orange mini dress and white leather stiletto heels…bleached dirty blond hair...I look like a western female in my little straw black men's hat, black T-shirt and torn blue jeans and snickers….she looks perplexed, yet very friendly. I tense up..what will we talk about?

So, what is it you do? what is it for? How can that which you do can be applied to life and to what function? No "useful" function? …I cannot explain anything at all…I try to humor it but I'm too tired and now, annoyed. Have I not learned anything?

It's hot and pleasant. I sleep till noon. I feel closer to home…this feels Australian already, plus the Russian, the memories the familiar vague ground of resistance is coming back…annoyance at not knowing how to talk to these people I used to be around all the time as a child.Then we had no problems. We are so incredibly apart now. I cannot contain it. My Russian tongue feels tight. I need to loosen it, I haven’t spoken it for a while..I'm going soon to my parents. Point zero. For now, California provides a transitional point and a cushion. Rest. Stop. Digest. New York is noisy, right? I have never been. Yes. And so is Chicago. You must be rich to be able to be so free? Rich? I try to politely drop the subject. No I don't make paintings as such, only as part of an idea, a project, no I don't make marble sculptures no I don't, I don't. What is it you do? Nothing. Who needs it? Where is the market for it, who buys it, what for? Maybe I shouldn't have come here.

I gesture towards the head and heart many times. That's all I have for now. Head and heart. I cannot remember the last time I sold my art. I can draw, yes. You can put it on a wall. Yes. I feel extremely aware and somehow, wide…something has happened, my world is larger than large….an Armenian man is suddenly interesting to me…this is not my world at all…he observes me, asks polite questions..nothing about my personal life until the very late in the night..and now we want to know…marriage? Family? Boyfriend? No I say, I'm not interested. Never been my goal to get married…he ponders. Yes. The right person, your person, will come. You are deep. I bet you love to just think.You see, you love to fly long distances, you use it well, you think, digest. We cannot wait until it is over, we drink and waste our "nothing" time, whereas you treasure it. Am I right? He is right.

I rub my hands with glee over flying time..the time of transition….my time to win and win back…….Yes, I murmur. How strange….yes. I'm never bored. Boredom? Irrelevant, my boredom, if exists, is a subject matter. My thoughts fly me over far.

It is a strange compulsion to observe and not take part….I feel like a child when I do that, observing the adults, wishing silently and angrily to grow up soon as possible..I'm too smart to be a child, I remember thinking…silently watching, hardly speaking. Suddenly a tiny unlikely leader of our courtyard and boys…our dusty streets and wheat fields….corn fields..stealing corn, owned by no one.Falling of bikes and leading boys into freezing water in an outdoor kindergarten pool….getting pneumonia the next day…nearly dying..breaking limbs ice skating…twice…painting watercolor still lives in private lessons in an artist’s studio… We exchanged our one room place outside of Odessa and my grandma’s one bedroom apartment for a 3 room place and moved in together…..

Until I was 15 and then …suddenly: Australia.. not so sudden. 2 years of painfully immigrating; slowly…A process. I didn't understand it . It was too surreal to fully take into my head.….I kept telling my girlfriends I'm moving to Australia ….no one believed it..it can't be…how can that be..that doesn't exist…although we studied its geographical location and history…it was a place in my textbooks where nobody lives. Right? Wrong.

The van is coming for us in 2 hours.....Someone’s birthday party and furniture is being taken out of our apartment day by day. I'm watching a Brazilian soap on TV: The rich also cry…..they come for the TV….and the chair I am sitting on…I go out to the street and meet my friends..walk my dog…some girls cant say goodbye…they come to the train station, from which we take the train to Kiev. It is the last time I ever see that street where our apartment was. Just a gloomy street full of communist apartment blocks, balconies with glass and clothing and jars…my first kiss... my cheeks burning with desire…he was a gypsy…he came everyday in a new stolen car; he told me he was 16; he was 18 and one day ended up in jail..his brother came by my apartment one day and gave me a message ..I never saw both of them again…..that was my first love and a fist disaster. It followed on from there…

Never wait for your Prince on a white horse….Never. All are prostitutes….some do it for money some do it for dinners some do it for houses, jewellery….careers…?

Reading Topol… "Russia in bed".

The world of brothels……hatred of men.

Anywhere. How did I ever make it out of all that?

Mirrors catching sunlight….flying around the kitchen as a frantic reminder of movement….and life.

Desperately glamorous….going to a supermarket in your heels and lipstick. You never know. Never know what?

Remember yourself? Where were you going?

Sensing freedom..somewhere else….where there are no weddings at 16 ..

Watching Beverly Hills 90210 on stolen cable network and dreaming of that made-up, fantastic paradise. Oh California...

Those days of dieting and hungry sleep; running twice a day; wishing for a very thin body: starving my brain; almost fainting..dressing up into extremely tight clothes and dancing on stages at Russian discos…

...breaking free eventually.

FIFTEEN: ciao NYC//books//pavements and bad ROMANCE

stillife, photo Katya Grokhovsky

Ciao NYC: things that go rapidly through my mind and pass by, eventually landing strategically in front of me, watching me sadly, as I listen to random music selection on I-tunes. Chinatown, bean curd and hot and sour soup. Extreme fatigue and daily desire for solitude increase steadily, as the hot streets of New York burn my feet. The Strand and hours of books. Uncontrollable urge to read absolutely all. Overstimulation and under-production are merging and piling up , slowly growing into a monstrous fluctuating mountain of ideas. DIA Beacon, The New Yorker and freshly squeezed fruit morning juice "eye-opener": carrot, celery, orange, ginger...

Eyes. Richard Serra and sudden vertigo, dominated and squashed. Rescued by Bourgeois, smothered by her "Maman", the spider, caught, layered and drawn in. I will never leave.

Minimalism does not agree with me on most days. Joseph Beuys, felt-ed and caressed.

DIA bookshop:
Joseph Beuys, The reader

Books bought at The Strand:

Childsplay the art of Allan Kaprow, Jeff Kelley
No one here belongs more than you, Stories by Miranda July
What I talk about, when I talk about running, a memoir, Haruki Murakami
Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of others
Shocking life, The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli
The post human DADA guide, Tzara and Lenin play chess, Andrei Codrescu
Marina Abramovic, The Artist is present

New Museum's bookshop:
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Pavement pounding daily, miles of art looked at, attention spanning faster and harder, thoughts of open waters and ships, disappearing into long distance travel. Third week , New York presses harder against me, I am awash with guilty pleasures of reading in. I am sorry, I cannot see anymore. Seeing, as wanting, I can no longer want, I am full, no longer ready to run , I consume blueberries by the cold hand full and enjoy the current sudden alonness of the dorm room. Just for now.

Karaoke in Chinatown at winnies and not-so-cheap gin and tonic, I sing along with others, too shy to karaoke myself, yes, shy. Fun! shrimp in sweet tropical sauce (what is that?), caramelized wallnuts and too much broccolli, prolonged train ride to Mary Heilmann's studio and The Hamptons, one of Madonna's houses is around the corner, is it?, Earl, the overweight beautiful dog and spicy chicken, peacufull mental pause and no sound of police sirens, American flags and churches, wealthy looking, over-priced and overvalued antique and outdoor furniture stores, fake salon tans and shiny people, their large groomed dogs: rotten teeth salute us at the front desk of Dan Flavin Institute situated in an old baptist church, the front-desk guy smiles widely and greets us with genuine enjoyment, he must have been here a while, neon cross: really? PS1, Chelsea, Whitney independent study studio program opening at Art in General: and finally: last day of class ends with SAIC alumni night at Cue Foundation. Good food, wine and familiar faces fill the room. Sense of history and belonging suddenly hit me and I am teary. Drunk buzzy happiness, sense of achievement and hopefull greatness ahead.

We start our class with saying goodbye to Louise Bourgeois and end with the death of Sigmar Polke. RIP and Bon Voyage.

Broken: favourite shoes, left standing on the pavement in New York. Thank you Returning soon.taxi and flights to California.

Somewhere is my sleepy flip-paradise. Books, mangoes, sea and cold white sheets, hammocks, fresh love and open spaces, raw conversations, dance on sand, silk dresses and espresso martinis, fire-barbecued sea food, Russian songs......I am not romantic, I protest at dinner, I am not, I am not....sitting in front of an open window, as I am writing this, Chelsea outside, I retreat, ok, I am a fully blown decadent Romantic. Lay me down onto a decaying dishevelled brocade covered bed, in frayed burnt silks, blood and thirst, sweat and tears, ice and fire, lay me down with knives and foxes, wolves and dingoes, feathers and mink coats, black pearls and rough cut diamonds, shower me with rose petals, thorns and french champagne, scratch my skin and crawl...black and gold caviar, cowebs and millions of cherries, lace covered legs: drown me in murky bloody waters of Ophelia, cry over my young curves in my diamond encrusted coffin, read Pushkin and Nabokov to me in soft whisper, sing loudly, play a crying violin, dance like it is the last time you will ever dance on this planet, turn me into a crying tragic suffering being and beg, scream and unveil, die ....

Romance and bad.

FOURTEEN: 31 May 2010//Thank you and Thank you: LOUISE BOURGEOIS//MARINA ABRAMOVIC//

stillife, photo Katya Grokhovsky, 2010

...New York City: on May 31st 2010, Memorial Day, Louise Bourgeois, 98, dies in hospital , as Marina Abramovic ends her now infamous performance in MOMA. Fate, Electricity and hope in the heated city. Second week in New York. Study trip. Consumed by art wholly and forever. Artoholic? absolutely. Humanist? perhaps. emotionalist? possible. sucker for tears? Marina provides and Thank You, Marina. Thank you, Louise. Putting my hand on my heart mentally, in re-enactment of Marina's gesture, I Thank these two artists, from yes, the bottom of the barrel of my heart, which, as I realize, once again, whilst observing Marina's tears and tasting my own, exists. Forever and behold.R.I.P Louise.


stillife, 2010, photo Katya Grokhovsky

Black Russian bread sandwiches, salami and avocado, Chelsea: 19th street, New York Arts Program dorms, 29th street, heat and nauseating smell of decay shooting up my nose, top bunk bed and fear of falling, mussels in coconut milk, Happy hour at Half-King bar, Angel Otero's studio and beer on the roof, gold paint and assistants....

Saya Woolfalk's studio and hundreds of pages of research: work hard, Saturday at Franklin Furnace, Brooklyn's 5th avenue, 2 apples for one dollar, pumpernickel bagel and 2 eggs, blueberries, mango and raspberries, pomegranate juice and vanilla rum, stories of old New York and Establishment of our holly art world: Tino Sehgal, this is propaganda, 2002, Polly Apfelbaum's studio: sequined scraps on the floor, skeptical optimism and finding the fuck you....

bad painting all around, teeth hurt by bad painting....

parents on skype, plans for San Francisco, overwhelmed, art overdosed and happily exhausted. Coffee and water, crepe with smoked salmon, shrimp salad and brushetta, mocchiato....I don't eat hot dogs from the stands on the corners of new york, cabana outpost and extra chicken burrito, thank you, passer-by attendance of Saturday mess at catholic Chelsea church, wishing for religion....art, Outsider porn: touching elbows with John Waters, Chelsea openings, Chinatown, 3 dollar soup and East village, free drinks, Vernita Nemec's stories, hot sticky nights and smelly streets, the walls are cooler than the sheets, The Kitchen and Baryshnikov Art centre: two part dance performance, bus transfer during intermission, only in new york: consumed and anxious, extreme shoulder and neck fatigue, bad pillow, french toast and rude awakening by fire alarm on Sunday morning, who done that?

stillife, photo Katya Grokhovsky

THIRTEEN: back to NYC: //Marina//good fortune, if firm and correct//mango cheesecake// it used to be....

nyc spring, 2010, photo Katya Grokhovsky

Marina. Skin melting, mango cheesecake, lucid: Complete tourist set of Middle-aged Germans, does she not pee all day long? Head in her hands, heavy and awake, white lights, Kate Gilmore's hills breaking through the male white cube, Boltanski, Balthazar cafe, DUMBO, Brooklyn, Chelsea boys, MOMA, Guggenheim, The Met, the bridge is beautiful, oh God it's a heavy rain, the squeezed freshly smell of the just-watered Earth -filled-room, the broken kilometer, quinoa salad, NY pizza,

Canal street and West Broadway, 2010, photo Katya Grokhovsky

Canal street, trucks and bags, you want handbag Miss miss miss, you need a handbag, the last bar in the world, German cigarette, classy and elegant to a particular smoker's taste, this is no longer new york, the high line, this isn't what it used to be, the 80's, do you know her she's also from Ohio, she lives two doors down from you, you have also lived here for 30 years? no?get off my roof it will leek, do roofs leek in Australia? PhD in philosophy and money, artist night, 5 dollar burgers, cherry wheat beer, where is new york, do you have spoons? false arrogance, the swimming pool space is closed, sex and the city 2 and a half stars, marina does not pee she holds it in for 9 hrs, emotional voyage to the dead, smoking in the bar circa tobacco, buckwheat crepes, opera cake, snow cone:

full satisfied attention span heavy 24hrs, whitney bienalle, the established feeling of glass walls how high how low what will I do for my art for art for my art? art: don't ask don't fear don't believe, long island iced tea, corona beer, cold sake, TV, two cats, he likes to be hugged all the time, who do you think I look like? what a woman, it used to be new york:

photo Katya Grokhovsky, 2010

melting soft and the hat, who do you think you are, actually the lady the lady let's see, turtles in Atlantic ocean, new york is not the same, the mall that is Manhattan, the city of you, overly consumed good fortune, mussels in garlic celery broth, poached eggs with salmon and melted cheese, baked brie with caramelized pear, shrimp, Coney island to be destroyed..
mixed up in the tender sticky soup of human,

Marina.

TWELVE: Bed//Kabakov//The layers//Ciao for now my Chicago

The Raft, Travel, 2009@SAIC studio
photo Katya Grokhovsky

From complete after-school-end-of-year-exhaustion and utter indulgent messy rest at the start of the week and 24hr life in bed to incredible times with friends and most inspirational lectures and speeches. I am full of gratitude. I shed some thank-you-tears and become sentimental and emotionally attached. I am attached to this place. At peace, but not at rest. Insatiable Traveling bugs are crawling all over me. My persistent gypsy spirit once awakened, slowly grows into a monster and I am ready to jump around the world.

However, before I temporarily leave the Chicago I fell in love with, I am going to attempt to symbolically interview myself aggressively, or perhaps, not, one more time and try to peel the layers of Katya Grokhovsky, as much as she, perhaps, will allow me to, or not.

K.G Katya?
K.G Yes?
K.G You are a mystery. An enigma. What are you hiding?
K.G Nothing much actually, I think I am a fictional enigma, or I'd like to think I am, or would like to be, or would like to create an illusion of. I am not sure at all about this, but it has been said to me on numerous occasions that I should open up more and reveal. I don't like to reveal. I like to conceal first.And then maybe, perhaps, very slowly, if it is the right place, time, people, person, etc.
K.G Sounds complicated . Don't you think?
K.G No, not really. I have a complex multi layered identity, some of which is a total construct.
K.G What do you mean by construct, who constructed it? How can that occur?
K.G It's very simple. I am a numerous immigrant. Well no, once an immigrant, always an immigrant. Emilia Kabakov said: once you migrate, you belong nowhere, to no place. Once you loose those roots, no roots can be re-grown. I agree with that. I have no roots. I like that. It makes, me, free? Well, freedom is very relative, but it does to some extent, exist. Australia is my adopted home, a surrogate, but I somehow feel more of an outsider there, than I do in America. I like America and so far, I think, I hope I truly wish, America likes me.
K.G Where is your home then?
K.G Right now Chicago. Melbourne has been home for a long time prior. My parents and long standing dear Friends are there. My histories are located three. Odessa, where I was born, is no longer home. Yet, once there, it is home completely. Home is an interesting notion I am not sure I truly understand. I have tried and tried to work with this question of home for a long time in my work and it somehow eventually manages to always fail and elude me. I think that is exactly what happens once you are an immigrant. You are always searching for something you lost, or know you want or need, but can never really find again. This is why I relate a lot to the work of Illya Kabakov. The Soviet mystery. The loss, the tragedy, the history, the place that is no longer, which is of course, a universal loss of home and childhood. I realized to my astonishment, that Kabakov, being the age of my parents, is the one who experienced what my parents experienced. They are the ones who went through true tragedy of immigration in the middle of their lives. I did not. I was 15 years old. Yes, I remember everything, but I did not have my whole life established somewhere else, prior to leaving. I finally understood why I cannot truly work with these notions, the Soviet subject. I have to work with it through my parents.
K.G I hoped you'd talk more about your actual personal experience of immigration to Australia.
K.G It is a long painful story. I never wanted to go there. I never wanted to live there. I was a minor, I had no say.We just left. It was a devastating experience. It was like a death, whilst being alive. I'm not explaining it all that well or articulating it perfectly, but it felt incredibly surreal. For the first 3 years there, I kept writing a lot of my observations down, thinking I will be going back, telling and showing my then girlfriends, what I saw and experienced. Many letters I wrote to them kept returning to me. my world as I knew it was dead to me. At that tender age, I had to re-emerge, re-appear as another. A construct somewhat. However, I of course, received great education in Australia, two magnificent bachelor degrees and do love the city of Melbourne, which holds a special place in my consciousness. But I always wanted More.
K.G More?
K.G More.


to be continued...........

I am sure the layers have not been peeled.....

Lectures attended:

Illya and Emilia Kabakov @MCA
Kerry James Marshall @MCA
SAIC Commencement Graduation ceremony
Architecture foundation boat cruise
Public light and space opening

Movie: Women without men by
Shirin Neshat


Plans, trains, buses await.
To NYC.