‘The Strange City’ beneath the dome of the Grand Palais (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

Beneath the bombastic Beaux-Arts dome of the Grand Palais in Paris, artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have installed an explorable city of white arches and curious pavilions dedicated to attempts and failures to reach a mystical plane. Called L’Étrange Cité, or The Strange City, the exhibition opened this month as part of the ongoing Monumenta series, which has brought high-profile artists like Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, and Richard Serrato work in the Grand Palais’s 16,000 square feet.

Arches of ‘The Strange City’

Emilia Kabakov is the first woman invited to participate in Monumenta for this sixth edition of the series, with her husband, Ilya. The Russian-born, Long Island–based couple have taken a different approach from previous artists by not directly interacting with the grandness of the space, but rather using its size to contain an ambitious project. It’s not always successful, but then a big component of their work over the years has been failure, much of it in response to the Soviet Union. Here, in The Strange City, people build ladders to try to reach angels and construct architecture to communicate with cosmic energy. The ideas are represented in sculptures, paintings, installations, and drawings in white-walled pavilions.

Visitors use maps to navigate the “utopian and mysterious city” and are encouraged to interact with the space (although no selfies are allowed, per the exhibition rules). The day of my visit was rather gloomy, with rain pattering on the glass ceiling and the sturdily built city cast in a gray pall. I imagine on sunnier days that the architecture of the installation might gleam as if on the Cycladic coast. Starting with the radar-shaped “Dome,” which mimics the Grand Palais’s own roof and pulses in different colors while playing corresponding tones, you wind through a maze of rooms centered on dreams of transcendence that end in failure. Alongside depictions of people aiming to better themselves through angelic encounters are drawings of angels crumpled heaps on the ground. In “The White Chapel,” fragments of Soviet propaganda dot the walls like the remains of a disassembled puzzle....Continue Reading

> via Hyperallergic