1. Ilya Kabakov
An Exploration of Totalitarianism and Utopia

2. Ilya Kabakov (1933 –)
 An “unofficial” Soviet artist (he was “officially” a
children’s book illustrator).
 Installation artist and sculptor.
 A member of the Moscow Conceptualists.
 Emigrated to the West in 1987, just four years before
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 In his later years, he began to collaborate with Emilia
Kanevsky, who later became his wife.

3. The Moscow Conceptualists
 A movement that shied away from the autonomous
abstractions in artwork.
 Considered a realist movement in ideology, but not
stylistically.
 “Contiguity, closeness, touchingness, contact with nothing,
emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of
Russian conceptualism... It is like something that hangs in
the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction,
connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing... So, then, we
can say that our own local thinking, from the very beginning
in fact, could have been called conceptualism.” - Kabakov

4. Major Themes
 Garbage, the discarded.
 Characters in isolation.
 Unfamiliar cultural surroundings.
 Ghosts, apparitions, absence of
presence.
 Chronology and proximity– spatial
relationships.
 The collapse of the Soviet Union.
 Criticism of totalitarianism.
 Escape from pathology through self-
analysis.

5. Kabakov and Space
“Kabakov’s communal apartments are spaces
haunted by negative bodies– spirits, ghosts,
specters. One sees the shadows, one hears the
voices, but one is never confronted with any living
presence. The world of Kabakov’s art is an
abandoned world. It is a world in which everything
that could happen has already happened. But it is
not a world without hope, for in this world
everybody can become an artist, and then also
abandon it.” – Boris Groys, History Becomes Form
(21).
This is exemplified in The Man Who Flew into his
Picture.

16. Bibliography
 Epstein, Mikhail: After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian
Culture, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
 Groys, Boris. "Moscow Romantic Conceptualism." History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism.
Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010. 21-22. Print.
 Groys, Boris. Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment. 1st ed. London:
Afterall, 2006. Print.
 Kabakov, Ilya. The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment. 1989. Exhibited at Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., New York. Comp. Larry Qualls. ARTstor.org. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.
 Kabakov, Ilya.
 Kabakov, Ilya.
 Kabakov, Ilya.
 Kabakov, Ilya.
 Kabakov, Ilya.

17. Bibliography (cont.)