Kitchen Debate

Prajakta Potnis’s Kitchen Debate (2014) is named after a heated debate on capitalism and communism that took place in 1959 between then United States Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The debate occurred in the middle of a model kitchen built for the American National Exhibition in Moscow. Nicknamed the ‘kitchen debate,’ the exchange brought down the monumental Cold War tussle between the US and the USSR to two men arguing bitterly in a make-believe kitchen.

Inspired by her excavation of this event, Potnis here proposes the kitchen —“a space where traditional and new value systems clash on a day-to-day basis”— as a site for dialogue. The installation is composed of two slide projections, a digital video projection and a site-specific wall installation composed of laterite blocks embedded with fossil-like impressions of everyday objects such as redundant kitchen tools. The slide projectors beam photographs of a working washing machine and a mixer grinder. By photographing these two everyday home appliances going through the daily grind, Potnis hopes to create a polemical conversation on repetition and consumption.

The single channel video was shot inside the sterile, temperature-controlled cavity of a refrigerator. An oversized cauliflower within the refrigerator emulates a frozen explosion, alluding simultaneously to the mushroom cloud and the fear of a nuclear war and to a more immediate danger–a genetically-modified vegetable.