The shape that the dust carpet takes is the outline of Ellis Island. Installation view at MAD, New York.

Igor Eskinja constructs his architectonics of perception as ensembles of modesty and elegance. The artist “performs” the objects and situations, catching them in their intimate and silent transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional formal appearance. Using simple, inexpensive materials, such as adhesive tape or electric cables and unraveling them with extreme precision and mathematical exactitude within strict spatial parameters, Eskinja defines another quality that goes beyond physical aspects and enters the registers of the imaginative and the imperceptible. The simplicity of form is an aesthetic quality that opens up a possibility for manipulating a meaning. It derives, as the artist states, from the need for one form to contain various meanings and levels of reading within itself. The tension between multiplicity and void constitutes one of the most important aspects of Eskinja’s mural “drawings” and seemingly flat installations. A void is still an active space of perception; it does not conceal; it comments on the regime of visibility, it invites the viewer to participate in the construction of an imaginary volume in an open space. The temporary nature of the artist’s spatial structures and the ephemeral quality of his carpets (where ornaments are carefully woven out of dust or ash) manifest a resistance to the dominant narratives of institutional apparatus and socio-political order.

Igor Eskinja's installation for the exhibition Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York consists in a floor carpet 7 x 4 mts long realized with dust; dust that the visitors of the museum have brought in the building with their shoes and that the museum's employees have carefully kept, following the artists' directions. The exhibition explores contemporary artworks that use non traditional materials, such as dirt. Eskinja’s work is featured in the section Swept Away Projects which will cast installations that encourage interaction with the public.

The carpet shares the stylistic characteristics of some of Eskinja’s previous installations, such as Project for Untitled Piece (2008) for the 7th Manifesta Biennial, only that this time the shape that the carpet takes is the outline of Ellis Island, and the decorative elements are displayed within it. Ellis Island has high historical and symbolic value, given that for years it was the place where all the immigrants used to arrive in New York.

Eskinja’s main medium is installation. In some of his works, he plays on the perceptual possibilities of the photographic dispositive and space; in each one of his photographs the artist puts in evidence the constructed character of our perceptive possibilities of reality and its representation. Using simple and non expensive materials, some of the installations he creates only exist to be immortalized in a photograph, and then destroyed. In others, as it is the case of [installation title] at the Museum of Arts and Design, the ephemeral dimension is probably the main feature of the installation.

The work fosters a new kind of interactivity that is intrinsically linked with its ephemerality and destruction, and in which every spectator will be faced with a kind of ethical dilemma: to walk on the carpet, to destroy and dissolve it with the interaction, or to just watch it from a distance as every other art work. The act and the sensation provoked in the visitor derived from the act of contributing to the destruction of the piece is not mild, and Eskinja counts on this. He is interested in the idea of interaction not so much as the possibility for the viewer of becoming a creator of a certain piece together with the artist, but in the emotional reactions and shifts it may produce in each different person.