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How do The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away and my photographic images of the installation present memory as constructed through archival systems of selection rather than through lived experience?
Fifteen minutes before closure on 30th December 2025, I encountered Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Garbage Man at The National Museum, Oslo. The painted wooden door through which one steps into the artwork seems, from a distance, to be the artwork. Only upon closer inspection does the viewer realise that there is a space beyond the white walls, and even then, my first step into the installation was tentative. I glanced to the corner of the gallery, wondering if the invigilator would stop me. Recognising no obstacle, I stepped in. Far from the sustained attention one might expect from a viewer intending to write about an artwork, or the embodied experience one might describe of an immersive ‘total installation’,1 my experience was fragmentary. Having briefly registered the density and organisation of the space, furniture piled high, toppling in the corridor, and cabinets containing ordered but not immediately legible objects in the next room, and anticipating that I would not have time to absorb it fully, I took out my phone to document it. My decision to spend my precious few minutes photographing the artwork rather than observing it directly was reflexive, fuelled by the fear of forgetting. Yet this reflexive gesture produced a paradox as to what, precisely, I was attempting to preserve if I'd never really experienced the artwork at all. Returning to the photographs, I noticed they’d begun to structure my recollection of the work and that what remained was not an intact memory of lived experience but a set of ordered fragments.
Upon further consideration, I began to understand that my initial impulse to photograph the installation can be understood not simply as a personal failure of attention, but as a historically conditioned mode of seeing that mirrors the systems of memory and identity in the face of Soviet bureaucracy that the work itself interrogates. I engage with Susan Sontag’s idea that photography, as an attempt to preserve experience, becomes, instead, an act of editing, in which experience is warped, and a sequence of discrete images
replaces the continuity of spatial encounter2. Through positioning my photographic documentation of the installation as a second comparative artwork, I consider that the photograph does not stand outside the work as documentation but operates as a continuation of its archival logic: a parallel system of memory production where the viewer, in taking photographs, becomes implicated in a system that both preserves and distorts, records and erases. Rather than undermining the experience of the artwork, this mediation reveals its underlying structure, demonstrating that memory, whether in the installation or in its photographic afterlife, is never a direct reflection of lived experience but a product of systems that organise and give form to the past. In dialogue with the examination of photography, I discuss systems of ignorance, present within the installation, which shape memory through the writing of Alexei Yurchak. I then consider how the archive and fictional archive can be understood as a method of constructing experience, drawing on Jacques Rancière. Overall, this essay aims to compare how memory is articulated across installation and photography, arguing that both operate through mediating processes that destabilise lived experience as a stable origin of representation, revealing the archive in both Kabakov’s installation and my photographic work not as an authoritative repository of meaning but as a site where memory is constructed through selective acts of preservation, omission, and supplementation that simultaneously add to and replace what was never fully present.
Although originally exhibited as part of Kabakov’s Ten Characters exhibition at the Ronald Feldman gallery, New York, 1988, The Garbage Man was conceived over twenty years in the attic of the artist’s studio in Russia, emerging from his own habit of arranging the scraps of paper which had accumulated.3 The installation presents a fictional story of a man who obsessively preserves and orders discarded materials. It is set within a reconstructed kommunalka, the communal apartments that structured everyday Soviet life across much of the twentieth century. By the 1960s and 1970s, these shared interiors had become closely associated with what is retrospectively termed the period of ‘stagnation’ under Brezhnev.4 As Alexei Yurchak observes, this era was characterised by the persistence of official structures alongside a growing sense of their internal emptiness, producing a social environment shaped by routine and quiet dissimulation rather than overt ideological conviction.5 Stepping over the threshold between gallery space and installation, the viewer enters a dimly lit corridor piled with abandoned furniture. Kabakov recalls the corridor as a recurring image of Soviet life, ‘When I glance back, to my past life, one of the main images which everything always reduces to is the corridor... straight ones, long ones, short ones, narrow ones, twisting ones. But in my imagination, they are all poorly lit and are always windowless.’6 Indeed, standing in the corridor, without knowing why, one becomes aware of a distinctly Soviet context. This knowledge is not confirmed through any visible traces; the room contains no propaganda, no signage, and no explicit historical markers. Instead, meaning is produced through absence, where the lack of identifiable information generates a sense of disorientation and uncertainty. This condition reflects broader Soviet systems of information management in which knowledge was not simply suppressed, but unevenly distributed and carefully regulated through official channels such as censorship institutions, like Glavlit, which controlled publishing and broadcasting7, restricted archives, and state-controlled education. Historical events were often partially omitted, reframed, or rendered inaccessible outside authorised narratives, producing what could be described as a structured field of ignorance8 rather than total silence. Within Kabakov’s corridor, this does not appear as direct censorship, but as an environment in which meaning has already been thinned out through omission and spatial restriction.
Here, Marek Ziółkowski’s account of collective forgetting becomes useful in understanding how memory can be shaped through structured absence. In his discussion of memory and forgetting after communism, he defines collective forgetting under three terms: that certain convictions will be reinterpreted, reduced or pushed back into the subconscious, that they are no longer the subject of public conversations, so that they are consciously discouraged from trying to remember and that they are not the basis for any practical action- individual or collective.9 In Kabakov’s corridor, this is not presented as an explicit act of censorship, but as an environment in which knowledge has already been selectively withdrawn, producing a space where familiarity and unreadability coexist. This can be understood through Yurchak’s description of late Soviet everyday life, in which participation in social and political systems often took the form of routine compliance rather than engaged belief. In his account of elections and meetings, individuals recall engaging in procedures such as voting or approving resolutions without necessarily retaining or fully understanding their content, suggesting that official processes functioned as forms of habitual participation rather than meaningful
knowledge exchange. One individual, Sergei (born in 1962), recollects, “Usually I was not quite sure what type of elections these were, or who the candidate was. I would just go to the local election centre, take the ballot with the candidate’s name, and put it in the voting box. This was the whole procedure for me. I would forget the name of the candidate a few minutes later. I don’t remember ever worrying that I was not more interested or that the elections were ‘fake.’”10 This recollection suggests that Soviet experience prioritised structural routine over education, where voting became automatic participation rather than meaningful engagement with knowledge, producing an apparent absence of memory when individuals are asked to recall their experiences. Within Kabakov’s corridor, this lack of informational depth is mirrored spatially; the viewer encounters an environment that feels historically specific yet remains partially unreadable. What emerges is not simply a representation of Soviet life within the kommunalka, but a system in which memory, knowledge, and perception are mediated through structures that determine what can be known, ignored and forgotten. The corridor thus presents memory as constructed through controlled access to information, where the framework of the archive is used to generate absence rather than knowledge, showing how structures which appear to protect memory can also restrict and distort it.
On the surface, it might appear that the photograph of the corridor seen in Figure 2 seems to counter the installation's work. As discussed, the atmosphere of the corridor is constructed through absence. It therefore rejects pictorial representation as any attempt to visually capture it risks imposing form onto something defined by its elusiveness, thereby reducing the immediacy of the experience to an illustration. This reading aligns with Sontag’s analysis of photography at the beginning of On Photography, as she asserts, ‘A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it... by converting experience into an image. In this sense, it could be said that photography is not simply descriptive but reductive, miniaturising experience into something contained and manageable. This reflects my own encounter with the installation, where the act of taking a photograph appeared as a kind of shield, a familiar, low-stakes task that displaced the need to fully engage with the environment. The resulting image, see figure 2, feels flattened: its cropped frame encloses vision within a single plane, imposes a false coherence, and contains uncertainty rather than allowing it to unfold.
However, rather than dismissing this reduction as a failure, either of perception or of the medium itself, it is more productive to understand it as revealing the specific logic through which photography operates. It is important to understand that the photographs of the installation do not simply function as documentation through which the installation can be revisited or more fully understood. Rather, the photograph must be considered as a work in its own right, producing a distinct set of ideas about how memory is constructed through processes of selection and archiving. In this sense, the apparent ‘reduction’ enacted by photography should not be understood as a diminished or less accurate version of the artwork, nor simply as a distortion for those who have not encountered it firsthand.
Instead, it is useful to understand the action of photographing through the logic of the supplement. While Sontag believes that photographing takes away from the original experience, this assumes that such an experience was ever fully present. Returning to the question I posed in the introduction of ‘what, precisely, I was attempting to preserve if I'd never really experienced the artwork at all’ points to a structural lack. Here, photography operates as the supplement in Jacques Derrida’s sense, as he writes, ‘But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace... As a substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief. Its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness, meaning that what appears as an addition is in fact a substitution for something that was never complete. In Kabakov’s corridor, where dim lighting and a lack of temporal and spatial signifiers prevent the work from being grasped as a unified scene, the photograph does not follow a full experience but takes its place. The act of photographing attempts to be a compensatory gesture, producing a fixed image where perception remains partial and unstable. Yet this apparent clarity is constructed through framing and exclusion, replacing the dispersed encounter with a coherent view that never existed as such. Photography, as a supplement, therefore, exposes the instability it seeks to resolve, where what is ‘preserved’ is not a stable memory but a constructed version of the work. In this sense, the authority of the archive is undermined, as both the installation and its photographic documentation reveal that memory is constituted through substitution rather than the retention of a complete, original experience.
It is possible to understand that memory is presented as a construction rather than a lived experience in the work with more nuance when it is analysed as a work of fiction. What has so far appeared as the careful construction of life through labelling, sorting and preserving is unsettled by the discovery that the Garbage Man is a fiction authored by Kabakov. The installation does not document a lived subject threatened by oblivion but fabricates one through archival procedure. Memory, in this context, does not precede the archival process but emerges as its effect. In other words, the archive does not preserve memory, it produces it. Jacques Rancière’s understanding of documentary as a mode of fiction clarifies this mechanism. Rancière argues that documentary is not the simple recording of reality but a mode of ‘fictioning’, a way of organising the real through selection, sequencing, and framing. I argue that The Garbage Man functions as a documentary in a similar way. Through an arrangement of signs and images, Rancière notes that documentary does not illustrate a memory but generates it.15 Kabakov’s installation operates precisely through this logic as we realise that the labelled scraps do not testify to lived duration, nor do they simulate it, but constitute it as the material through which memory is produced. In this way, by presenting a fictional subject through documentary devices, Kabakov exposes how memory- whether individual or collective- can be generated through the very systems that claim merely to preserve it.
Further, this aligns with Derrida’s assertion that ‘The archivization produces as much as it records the event,’16 suggesting that the archive is not a passive store but an active mechanism of creation. This once again corresponds to the logic of the supplement, as we realise that the act of archiving does not function as a secondary addition to memory but as what Derrida in Archive Fever calls a structural condition of memory itself, since ‘the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory,’17 meaning that what appears as preservation is in fact generated through a prior failure or absence within memory, in this case through a fictional character who never existed before. Indeed, this logic is not abstract but rooted in the visual culture that Kabakov addresses. Soviet photojournalism, often staged and edited using airbrushing and scalpel techniques to produce coherent ideological narratives, operated as a form of documentary fiction, constructing subjects rather than simply representing them.18Kabakov’s fictional Garbage Man can therefore be read as a response to this system by fabricating a figure who obsessively collects and classifies rubbish, he exposes the absurdity of a culture in which identity is already produced through controlled images and archives. In this way, the work does not simply depict censorship but parodies it, revealing how fiction can become a tool for state ideology to construct narratives that never existed.
Where Soviet systems sought to control and standardise identity, it is now possible to see how Kabakov’s use of the archive instead reveals how meaning emerges through acts that never simply preserve the past but actively shape what can be perceived and remembered. This idea takes on a final dimension in Kabakov’s reflection on spectatorship, where he writes, ‘for me the installation was primarily the inserting of the viewer into the field of manoeuvring between the objects. And, of course, I fully realise that the ‘real’ visitor of the installation is not this same viewer constructed by me, through whose eyes I see and evaluate what I have constructed inside.’19 Here, Kabakov explicitly acknowledges a gap between the imagined, controlled viewer and the unpredictable subject who encounters the work. Rather than resolving this discrepancy, he incorporates it into the structure of the installation itself, recognising that the work is continually reconfigured through the viewer’s partial and contingent experience. The archive he constructs is therefore not a closed or authoritative system, but one that depends upon forms of engagement that exceed his control. My own turn to photography can be understood as one form of engagement within this framework. It becomes clear that the act of photographing does not simply document the installation from the outside, but enters into its logic, producing a framed and stabilised image out of what was spatially and temporally unstable. In this sense, the photograph does not follow the work as a secondary record but becomes one of the conditions through which it is reconstituted, demonstrating that photographic supplementation is not an external addition but a structuring principle of how memory is produced across both the installation and its photographic afterlife.
To conclude, while photography initially appears to dampen the experience of the installation, producing a memory that may appear cropped or flattened, it comes to function instead as a meditation on the very structures through which the installation operates, acting as a supplement rather than a secondary record. The installation itself presents memory not as the preservation of lived experience but as something produced through a similar bureaucratic logic that governs visibility and absence within the work. The barren corridor of the kommunalka, far from indicating mere lack of memory, enacts the condition of structured erasure described by Ziółkowski and anticipated by Arendt in which what can be known is limited or unevenly distributed. It is within this condition that the compulsive collecting of the Garbage Man, analysed as a fiction, takes on significance, revealing that remembrance does not precede the archive but is shaped through it, as systems of classification determine how fragments come to appear as memory at all. This logic extends beyond the installation itself, whereby engaging with the work, whether by navigating its spaces or by photographing it, the viewer repeats these structuring processes, organising and stabilising what was never fully graspable in the first place. In doing so, both the installation and its photographic counterpart expose the instability of the archive itself, undermining its authority as a secure repository of memory as it emerges not as a neutral site of preservation but as an apparatus that continuously produces memory in the present through systems of selection.
Illustration list:
Figure 1. Varley, Meli. View from the installation’s doorway into the museum, Ilya
Kabakov’s The Garbage Man. 2025. Digital Photograph. The National Museum, Oslo.
Figure 2. Varley, Meli. View of the corridor, Ilya Kabakov’s The Garbage Man. 2025. Digital
Photograph. The National Museum, Oslo.
Figure 3. Varley, Meli. View of the left side of the archive room, Ilya Kabakov’s The Garbage Man. 2025. Digital Photograph. The National Museum, Oslo.
18
Figure 4. Varley, Meli. View of the right side of the archive room, Ilya Kabakov’s The Garbage Man. 2025. Digital Photograph. The National Museum, Oslo.
Figure 5. Varley, Meli. Close-up of organised and labelled garbage, Ilya Kabakov’s The Garbage Man. 2025. Digital Photograph. The National Museum, Oslo.
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Ziółkowski, Marek. ‘Memory and Forgetting after Communism’. Polish Sociological Review, no. 137 (2002): 7–24. JSTOR.