Prajakta Potnis: Kitchen Debate (2014)

Overview

During her research on the Cold War, Prajakta Potnis came across an ideological debate between US Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the grand opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow (1959), organised to promote labour-saving machinery and promote relations between the two countries. The heated exchange about capitalism and communism in the middle of a model kitchen set up for the fair later became known as the ‘Kitchen Debate’.

Potnis’ Kitchen Debate is an installation consisting of common household objects extracted from their regular space. She arranges multiple displays, including a recording of a cauliflower inside a freezer, a copy of Electrical Cooking and the ‘Kitchen Debate’. In this multimedia installation, Potnis raises questions about how the outside is affected by the inside, and examines the relationship between public and private spaces by proposing the kitchen as a site for dialogue, a space where traditional and new value systems clash on daily basis.