For the past two decades, Ilya Rabinovich has been documenting national museums—historical, military, and ethnographic institutions. His camera lens is directed at the ideological veneer which makes museum exhibits collective narrative mediators. It zooms in on the external package of ideology, examining how it is represented and designed and what information or facts it echoes, even unwillingly. Through this investigation into the exhibition of shared memory, Rabinovich clears a path beyond generalized assumptions and the national narratives manifested in museum exhibits.
As Rabinovich is a son without a national homeland, a perpetual immigrant communing between Moldova, Israel, and the Netherlands, he adopts an ingeniously new perspective on the selective memories of collectives that he himself was never truly a member of, enabling us to view them with fresh eyes. The juxtaposition of photographs from museums in Moldova and Israel allows him to expose the similarities between ostensibly distinct seminal ethoses, highlighting the distance between dominant national solidarity and the fragmented nature of the memorial spaces in which they are presented. Through defamiliarization and exposure of incongruity, bias, and inconsistency, his work provides us an opportunity to cast doubt on the “grand fable” and understand the way it forms memory and fuels ideology.
The project “Museutopia” is dedicated to this task and was first presented in Moldova (and later on in Israel and the Netherlands). The second part of the project was presented in 2019 in the Digital Art Center Holon. The third, with impeccable timing for the period, is ready to ask questions regarding institutional memory, of which we are often blind.