Ilya Kabakov Research Articles

Reconstruction of the past through artistic practices

Artists express their past experiences through artistic practices, bringing the personal and historical dynamics of the past into the present by using found objects. The relational nature of art practices created through the use of found objects has influenced how artists convey and represent their experiences, leading them to adopt different practices such as installation art. These artistic practices enable spectators to re-experience the past by transporting past experiences into the present. However, past experiences cannot be transferred to the present exactly as they were. The re-experiencing of past experiences should be viewed as a relational representational space that is reconstructed under the conditions of the present. This study examines how a past experience is transformed into a representational space in the practices of Michael Landy, Anny and Sibel Öztürk, Hale Tenger, and Ilya Kabakov. It focuses on the relationship between memory and space, emphasizing how past experiences are conveyed through representation with the relational impact of installation art, a contemporary art practice. The narrative potential and relationality of installation art bring together elements of objects, time, and representation to offer spatial experiences.

Московский концептуализм в монологе с авангардом

This article is the first to explore the relationship of Moscow conceptual artists with the creative and moral legacy of the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s-1920s. In the 1960s, the previous generation of Soviet non-official artists resonated with the avant-garde legacy upon getting acquainted with it and attempted to continue the tradition seen precisely as a formal experiment. Meanwhile, the Moscow conceptualist circle recognized Russian avantgarde as a conceptual source for the consequent ideologization of the entire reality and as a project of the violent transformation of life. And if social realism was a more obvious opponent for conceptualists, the forbidden art of the avant-garde became its own Other, alien in a very close and uncomfortable sense. The relations articulated in Moscow conceptualism over several decades were different and ambiguous; they developed and evolved as the legacy of the avant-garde became more familiar and as the socio-political and cultural context changed. In the 1970s, the conceptual art practice did not seek a ‘dialogue’ with the avant-garde, and the reflections of the older generation of Moscow conceptualists were marked with intention to dissociate themselves from the avant-garde and its aesthetic systems (the discussion of the political engagement of the avantgarde was pushed forward for later reflections, mainly into the 2010s). The 1980s brought liberalization into the study and exhibiting of the Russian avant-garde, and its admiration became a kind of duty that was taken ironically by the next generation of Moscow conceptual artists. To get international recognition, contemporary Russian art required to establish any affiliation (negative, if not positive) with the brand of the ‘Russian avant-garde’. The artistic practice of Ilya Kabakov has radically escalated the polemics with the avant-garde, which was subsequently projected onto the entire Moscow conceptualism. However, the exploration into the history of Moscow conceptualism as a response to the avant-garde project reveals heterogeneity of such a response, comprising individual halftones and historical dynamics.

Лингвистическое поколение: логоцентричные практики в произведениях современных российских художников (2010–2022 гг.)

The article is devoted to a study of the artistic phenomenon of textuality in contemporary Russian art from 2010 to 2022. The works of contemporary artists (Ivan Simonov, Timofey Radya, Vladimir Abikh, Vladimir Logutov, Semyon Motolyants, Mayana Nasybullova), whose creative practices give the text, phrases, words, statements a lead role, are analyzed here. The works of these artists have not yet been studied in detail by art historians, art critics, and culturologists, but nowadays their creations are widely featured at Russian and foreign exhibition halls, auctions, museums and private collections. The article pays special attention to the various art forms and medias — from painting to installation, from photography to street art and performance. It considers various types of connections between the word, its image, object and semantic meanings, and analyzes the dialogues between the verbal and the visual in the Russian contemporary art. Contemporary artists often work with narratology and visual language, subtle linguistic and pictorial categories. The semantic content of many artworks is multilayer and polysyllabic. The author comes to the conclusion that verbal-visual art is an established trend on the Russian art scene, closely related to the Moscow conceptual circle (Ilya Kabakov, Victor Pivovarov, Eric Bulatov, Andrey Monastyrski, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid).

일리야 카바코프 창작에 반영된 소비에트 아이러니와 노스탤지어 서사 충동

‘Nostalgia’ is a major theme that runs through the works of Ilya Kabakov (И. Кабаков), a Russian painter who represents Moscow Conceptualism. In this paper, based on Svetlana Boim"s definition of the word "nostalgia", we would like to analyze how two layers of nostalgia are realized in Kabakov"s creations. The layer of "restorative nostalgia" in Kabakov"s creations is developed with the reproduction of the "disappeared Soviet" space in the back of history. ‘Reflective nostalgia’ is reproduced based on Kabakov’s personal memory, which exists separately from the grand ideological narrative that occupied Soviet space and time. Furthermore, these two layers of nostalgia do not exist singly, but often appear in the form of a coexistence of a gigantic narrative formed in a isolated special space-time called "Soviet" and a micro-narrative embedded in the cracks. Therefore, in this paper, we will focus on the aspect of coexistence: the coexistence of "restorative nostalgia" and "reflective nostalgia" in’ Kabakov"s creations, and furthermore, the nostalgia of public objects composed of grand narratives and the nostalgia dependent on private memory made up of micro narratives. Kabakov often creates a configuration in which two forms of nostalgia coexist in his work. In addition, he projects his extremely private memories of a special form of nostalgia, namely, work schedules, toilets, and public houses, which are hard to see as objects of nostalgia, suggesting the double implications of Soviet space and time. Furthermore, in Kabakov"s creations, the nostalgic narrative impulse is not limited to simply the memories surrounding an individual. This reveals the "aesthetic nostalgia" for his artistic predecessors such as Malevich and Leonardo da Vinci, and expands to overcoming the masters of art. The summoning of a master of art by aesthetic nostalgia echoes the theme of "little man", one of the essential subjects in Russian literature. Moreover, it leads to declaring that Kabakov"s creation has entered the post-Sots era beyond conceptualism and Sots-Art. Based on the above, in this paper, various layers of nostalgia embodied in Ilya Kabakov"s creation, that is, "restorative nostalgia" as an official representation of Soviet space and time, and "reflective nostalgia" as a hidden private memory of the space, and furthermore, the aspect of the manifestation of "aesthetic nostalgia" as awedness and overcoming of masters of art and their works will be analyzed. Through this, we would like to explain the form and implications of Soviet space-time reproduced through a nostalgic narrative in Kabakov"s creations, and furthermore, the method of recalling and overcoming the avant-garde and socialist realism as a part of aesthetic nostalgia.

From The Editors

The articles in the second section of our double issue focus on art practices from Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Palestine. Each in their own way, these authors discuss art and film practices that complicate the process by which we establish genealogies, trace histories, and narrate historical developments, intervening in linear trajectories and pointing to possible alternatives.In his article, Branislav Jakovljević reviews the richly illustrated 1926 book Creativity of the Mentally III (Tvorchestvo dushevnobol'nikh) by Russian psychiatrist Pavel Ivanovich Karpov as an outstanding, if largely forgotten, example of the rich collaborative, transdisciplinary research culture that existed in the Soviet Union during the early 1920s for the study of creativity from what we might today refer to as “outsider” positions: from nonacademic folk art to art produced by children and the mentally ill.Mary A. Nicholas devotes her contribution to an alternative genealogy of Moscow Conceptualism as it evolved in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, with a special focus on the performance art group Gnezdo (“The Nest,” active 1974-79). Accounts of Moscow Conceptualism tend to privilege Ilya Kabakov and the group Collective Actions as the phenomenon's progenitors, without considering the contributions—foundational in Nicholas's estimate—made by Sots artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid and their exploration of the communicative role of official speech. It is to the latter artist duo and their broadened understanding of their audience that the members of Gnezdo turned for their own actions.Adair Rounthwhaite examines in her article performative aspects in photographs by Yugoslav artist Željko Jerman. Specifically, she argues that in his experimental work of the 1970s, Jerman turned the photographic development process into a performative act, with far-ranging ramifications for his self-enactment as a creative subject. According to Rounthwhaite, Jerman viewed photography not as a linear process whose upshot and endpoint was a positive representation, but as a performative space that exploits the photograph's material properties, to varied and broadly unpredictable results.Greg Burris's investigation of contemporary Palestinian cinema focuses on two documentaries, from the 1980s and 2000s, respectively. Burris argues that both films carve out a space in the Palestinian imaginary that is not fully consumed by the logic of resistance, a logic that understandably has tended to dominate Palestinian filmmaking over the decades. Not coincidentally, dreams, in particular, can serve to represent the “unoccupied spaces” that offer themselves to imagining a future in which Palestine and Palestinians can finally be free to determine their own destiny.

Changing public spheres – from Eastern European underground to international platforms

This essay explores the work of at artists from different generations who have dealt with restrained public spheres, counteracted by their work: Russian Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933), Czech Kateřina Šedá (b. 1977) and the collective digital platform Harabel in Albania. Many artists who worked within the Soviet Union were subjected to extremely deman­­ding conditions. All the same several found ways of collaborating in col­lec­tive strategies, as in the case of Ilya Kabakov, who ‘defected’ in 1989 in New York. In the west the reception of Kabakov´s art has to a large extent been reductionistic in the sense that it was initially culturally biased, tied directly to biography and nationality rather than understood as fundamentally multifaceted. Šedá’s situation is a very different one, working within a social and conceptual conception of art. She has repeatedly engaged a variety of local societies in combining city planning, daily life, politics and the private sphere in her art. In Albania a younger generation of artists has created communication networks across geographic boundaries with a main focus on digital platforms. The question the essay revolves around is the following: How does one conceive of artistic approaches to the collective in the aftermath of totalitarian systems?

Cosmic Inspirations and Explorations by Soviet Nonconformist Artists

The author explores diverse artistic trends and styles in works by Nonconformist artists Vyacheslav Koleychuk, Francisco Infante, Eduard Steinberg, Dmitri Plavinsky, Petr Belenok, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and Konstantin Khudyakov, and their relationship to the ideas of the Russian cosmism movement. She traces historical and cultural contexts for Soviet Nonconformist art from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s and the artists’ interest in early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde practices. Elaborating on a long interdisciplinary tradition while balancing scientific and metaphysical views of art, their works allude to the multidimensional reality of our cosmos. Cosmism may offer an escape into one's own cosmos, fantasy and dreams.

Contemporary artworks as transformational objects in art psychotherapy museum groupwork

This paper examines two group art psychotherapy programs held in 2017 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST). It focusses on three contemporary artworks by Kimsooja, Ilya Kabakov and Sophia Kosmaoglou belonging to the EMST collection and how working with these groups was explored through objects relations theory. The paper looks at how these artworks became evocative as transformational objects to bring about change. The conclusion is that contemporary art is beneficial when working psychotherapeutically in the museum environment through relating it to existing object relations theory. We conclude that professionals who run museum and gallery-based psychotherapy groups will find the contributions of object relations theory and contemporary art beneficial in this way.

Toward a Soviet Poor Art: Ilya Kabakov’s Use of Trash

This article examines the evolution of Soviet non-conformist artist Ilya Kabakov’s work to consider questions of influence and reception from within the U.S.S.R as well as in Europe and beyond. Komaromi compares Kabakov’s use of poor-quality objects (plokhie veshchi) and trash (musor) with the practices of Italian artists associated with Arte Povera to determine in what sense Kabakov produces a Soviet poor art. She further juxtaposes his approach to trash with the techniques of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines. While Rauschenberg’s combines present the resistant materiality of discrete objects, Kabakov’s trash ultimately invites consideration of the material context according to what Komaromi calls a syntax of reception. Audience responses to Kabakov’s works, including his famous installations with trash, speak to western and post-Soviet perceptions of Soviet and Russian identity, with implications also for how those audiences understand themselves.

The Artist Nomad

When Ronald Reagan infamously declared the Soviet Union to be the “Evil Empire” in 1983, he was playing upon a fundamental axiom of Cold War politics: that the world can be neatly divided between the First World of Capitalism and the Second World of Communism. Equating this divide with that of good and evil only served to strengthen the notion that the two sides were mutually exclusive. Personal politics were an extension of this perspective. One was either a Capitalist or a Communist—to reject one was equivalent to embracing the other. This paper examines the art of dissident artists such as Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, and Ilya Kabakov; artists from the Soviet Union who were exiled to the West during the Cold War. It seeks to better understand why these artists’ rebellion against the Soviet system did not translate into an embrace of Western culture upon arrival in America. The roots of their critical artistic approach are interpreted through the prism of ideological nomadism which reveals their art to be deeply ambivalent. These artworks are analyzed as a disruption to the binary understanding of the Cold War and Post-Soviet eras by their embrace of a liminal position in the overlap between the capitalist and communist cultural milieus.

Ilya e Emilia Kabakov na exposição Not everyone will be taken into the future

O artigo tem como objetivo fazer uma leitura sobre a exposição Not everyone will be taken into the future dos artistas Ilya e Emilia Kabakov que ocorreu na Tate Modern em Londres entre os anos de 2017 e 2018. O texto aborda os gestos artísticos que são persistência e recorrência nas obras apresentadas na exposição: a problemática da História da Arte, a presença de biografias e autobiografias de ficções e verdades e a possibilidade do voo, do escape. A partir dessas questões, pode-se pensar no gesto artístico como algo que sempre retorna na produção de um artista, como uma obstinação e premeditação em suas obras.

The Nature of Time in Multimedia Installations (With Emphasis on the Works of Doug Aitken and Ilya Kabakov)

The multimedia Installation with the use of two or more different media of art, while creating an atmosphere to remove the audience from its passive mode, has a different way of dealing with the time problem than before. The purpose of this paper is to identify the element of time in multimedia presentations, with emphasis on the works of two artists, Doug Aitken and Ilya Kabakov. In order to achieve this goal, the conceptual framework and methodology of this analysis is based on the Gottfried Boehm and G. E. Lessing approaches. The nature of time in multimedia Installations is the issue of the present study. The results of this study showed that multimedia Installations seek to break the linear narrative of time. Doug Aitken, in his Installation, creates a sense of time-insensitivity using cinematic techniques such as slow motion, fast motion and repetition of sequences. While Ilya Kabakov offers a series of components related to individual life against the lens of time. In the works of both artists, a new understanding of the time is created for the audience to have successive and concurrent readings.

THE IRONY OF SOCIAL REALISM: SOTS-ART AS AN EARLY STAGE OF RUSSIAN POSTMODERNISM

Socialist art, which is shortly known as Sots-art is an art movement derived from the reality of Social realism by the late 1950's. The term was first used in 1972 by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexandr Melamid to define the brand-new Russian pop-art as an alternative to American pop art. Sots-art is an ironic expression of oppresive social realism, therefore, allegorically approaches to Soviet totalitarism using typical Soviet discourses. Sots-art is quite closely related to Moscow (Russian) Conceptualism, namely share similar grounds and therefore usually associated to it. One can say with certainty that both of them share the same views on art such as destroying the classic sense of art and creating a new art form. Sots-Art is also closely related to postmodernism, not only in terms of sense, but also technically. The movement makes use of postmodernism’s beloved techniques like deconstruction, intertextuality and other rhetorical devices to release his voice. In this respect it is regarded as an essential component of Russian conceptualism and postmodernism. Having known that Soviet discourses played a crucial role in Soviet society’s memory, Sots-artists took advantage of its plain but picturesque language and inverted it to an Anti-Soviet art using the slogans and expressions that are inherent in them. Sots-art, as an art movement is tend to reconsider and reevaluate the Soviet past by defamiliarizing, estranging socialist cliches. The reflections of this estrangement can be seen both in art and literature; especially in the works of Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Dmitrri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein and Vladimir Sorokin. The history of Sots-art movement, its’ features and correlation with Russian postmodernism are examined and discussed in this paper.

Installation art: between image and stage

This book explores how installation art developed into an interdisciplinary genre in the 1960s, and how its special intertwinement of the visual and the performative has acted as a catalyst for the generation of new artistic phenomena. It investigates how it became one of todays most widely used art forms, increasingly expanding into consumer, popular and urban cultures, where the installations often spectacular appearances ensure that they fit into contemporary demands for sense-provoking and immersive cultural experiences. Making an important contribution to the development of the critical and theoretical discourse on installation art, Ring Petersen addresses a series of basic questions: What is an installation? What techniques does it employ? How does installation art affect its viewers? How can we explain the rise of installation art in a cultural-historical perspective? Answers to these questions are pursued through analyses of installation arts spatial, temporal and discursive aspects as well as its reception aesthetics and cultural-historical contexts, and through analyses of a large number of works from a variety of sub-genres, including performance installations, video installations, installational exhibitions and recent use of installation in commercial contexts, including by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Mona Hatoum, Pipilotti Rist, Ilya Kabakov, Superflex, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Holler, Terike Haapoja and ART + COM.

Art and democracy in post-communist Europe

The conclusion of the Cold War in 1989 signalled the beginning of a new era in Eastern Europe, and this widespread change was felt no less strongly in the world of art. In Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, Piotr Piotrowski examines the art made after 1989 in Eastern Europe in light of the profound political, social, economic and cultural transformations in the region. As well as discussing these transformations, Piotrowski describes the changing nature of artworks themselves - from work moulded by the cultural imperatives of the communist state, used as a tool of political propaganda, to autonomous work protesting against and resisting the ruling powers. He describes the rich tradition of anarchistic motifs and themes of protest in Eastern European art, and the emergence of a utopian vision in more recent times. The discussion includes themes of communist memory; the critique of nationalism; issues of gender after 1989; and the representation of historic trauma in contemporary museology, going on to discuss the recent foundation of museums of contemporary art in Bucharest, Tallinn and Warsaw. The function of art in post-communist Europe is assessed, and above all its restrictions and hidden censorship mechanisms. Throughout the book the author provides close readings of many artists, some new to a Western audience, such as Ilya Kabakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Marina Abramovic's work responding to the atrocities of the Balkans. This cogent investigation of the artistic reorientation of the former Eastern Bloc breaks important new ground, and fills a major gap in contemporary artistic and political discourse.

Ilya Kabakov and the (Traumatic) Void of Soviet History

This paper examines the problem of history as a traumatic void in the work of the visual artist Ilya Kabakov, focusing in particular on Jewish history in so far as it relates to the story of Jewish fathers and sons in Kabakov's 2004–2005 installation 'The Teacher and the Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov'. For this installation, Kabakov created a fictitious forerunner, Rossenthal, a fictitious alter-ego of himself, and a fictitious disciple, Igor Spivak. The paper asks to what extent Kabakov's installation, a form of alternative history, fills in or reproduces the gaps of Soviet historiography when it comes to Jews.

Moscow conceptualism in context

The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection at Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum is the largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art in existence. Comprising more than 25,000 works by over 900 artists, it documents the activities of underground artists from Moscow and Leningrad, as well as from the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan between the years 1956-1987. This volume features the most outstanding of these works in stunning color and black-and-white reproductions. Essays by leading scholars and statements and interviews with artists such as Ilya Kabakov, the Gerlovins, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who played a major role in this important movement, offer a general critical appraisal and history of the movement and highlight certain distinctive aspects such as performance and experimental art. The book also looks at this movement through a Western lens, comparing and contrasting the works with those of the Conceptualists in the US and the rest of the Free World.

The surreal house

Through a unique blend of art, photography, film, and architecture, Surreal presents individual dwelling as a place of mystery and wonder. Fusing house and dream, it probes relationship between interior and shell, object and space, and it elaborates the marvelous and compulsive beauty as espoused by Andre Breton. haunted house, cabinet of curiosities, ruined castle, cage, cave, box, labyrinth, bell jar, and womb are among uniquely surreal habitats explored. Shaped by irrational and subversive, flip side of modernist paradigm of functional, rational dwelling, Surreal is ripe for discovery. Mirroring surrealist love of poetic juxtaposition, project brings together works by artists such as Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Joseph Cornell, and Salvador Dali. A surreal legacy is to be found in interiors of little-known Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino, in Frederick Kiesler's model for The Endless House (1957-59), in sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Rebecca Horn, and in installations by Edward Kienholz and Ilya Kabakov. Contemporary architecture is represented by work of Rem Koolhaas and Diller & Scofidio, among others. A manifesto for a poetic reading of house, Surreal reflects on unquestionable importance of dwelling, cradle of our being, in imaginative realm. This richly illustrated account brings together a host of commentators and historians, and accompanies a major exhibition.

The experimental group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow conceptualism, Soviet avant-gardes

most comprehensive story of unofficial postwar Soviet art yet to appear in any language, The Experimental Group takes as its point of departure a subject of strange fascination: the life and work of renowned conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov. Kabakov's art - iconoclastic installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts - delicately experiments with such issues as history, mortality, and disappearance, and here exemplifies a much larger narrative about the work of the artists who rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. By placing Kabakov and his conceptualist peers in line with our own contemporary perspective, Matthew Jesse Jackson suggests that the art that emerged in the wake of Stalin belongs neither entirely to its lost communist past nor to a future free from socialist nostalgia. Instead, these artists and the work they produced are inextricably part of transnational art world for which the Soviet Union is largely a memory, fading fast. Though remembrance tends to paint the past in broadly heroic tones, The Experimental Group leaves aside the art-hero in order to explore the everyday activities of individuals who circulated in a cultural environment that ultimately unmade the Soviet Union. Encompassing most of the nonconformist art world that emerged between the late 1950s and mid-1980s, Jackson's narrative builds outward from the life and art of Kabakov to the multimedia undertakings of the Moscow Conceptual Circle, bringing into focus a forgotten avant-garde that flourished in the shadow of the official Soviet art establishment. Lavishly illustrated in full color, and including many rare and previously unpublished documentary images, The Experimental Group is not only a vital contribution to a neglected chapter in the history of twentieth-century art but also a brilliant illumination of the life and work of one of its most remarkable figures.

Imagination and Alternative History: "Fictional Artists" in Ilya Kabakov’s Works

Imagination and Alternative History: "Fictional Artists" in Ilya Kabakov’s Works