Denkmal für einen verlorenen Handschuh, 1998, Ilya Kabakov

Until I visited the sleepy St Alban road along the Rhine in Basel, the only thing common between Ilya Kabakov and me was that we didn’t know each other. But as I walked along the old city walls with overgrown trees on one side and the fishermen hauling their catch on the other, I could sense a strange sense of familiarity.The feeling crystallised the moment I entered the turn towards the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. I noticed nine unusual metal plaques placed on metal poles and lined up in a semicircle almost like music stands staged for an open-air musical concert. Each plaque had a reflection of my experience along the St Alban road.For instance, one of the plaques says: the sun reflecting on the flowing water, the noise of the water…carries us to a time when romanticism was in fashion, and long poetic strolls, like here, for example – along the rapid Rhine, under the trees - this is exactly how I felt a few moments ago; a strange sense of association.Another one deliberates: you may find the most diverse kind of junk and ordinary metal parts suddenly become invaluable. What makes the ordinary thing extraordinary is an artist’s perspective and the proximity to a museum. It is an unusual note left in an unexpected place.Each plaque also has a quaint submission about a lost glove laced in a certain degree of humour, sadness and poetry. These texts are engraved on the metal surfaces in four languages: French, English, German, and Russian – all of them similar in form and structure.I took pictures of all nine plaques, reached my room, googled it and discovered the life and works of Ilya Kabakov. Throughout his forty-year plus career, Kabakov has produced a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations, and theoretical texts – most of them with an inherent message of internal conflict or the alter ego like the ‘Fallen Chandelier’ in Zürich or the 1965 Shower series where a man is depicted standing under a shower but with no water.This installation, called the Monument to a Lost Glove, was first installed at the City Park in Leon in 1996. Later, similar versions were put up in New York, Hudson, and Providence. In 1998, a permanent installation was built at Basel. Its justification: any piece of nonsense, even a glove lost by someone, can acquire infinite value and significance if it is capable of touching something very important and dear to us in our memories, in our past. Whoever said art imitates life, probably picked up the glove and pocketed it!

Touching artwork with a delicate presence