ART-TRIBUTE:Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

By the occasion of the exhibition of Ilya & Emilia Kabakov at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, we make a tribute at the work of these important artists. Ilya Kabakov started to work on installations evoking daily life in Russia in the early ‘80s. After 1989 he started working together with his wife Emilia Kabakov on large scale installations, which combine elements of the everyday life with conceptual art. While their work is deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context in which the Kabakovs came of age, has universal significance. That significance takes a global vision after they moved to N. York.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Power Station of Art Archive

In 2014 for the 6th Monumenta in Grand Palais-Paris, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov presented “The Strange City”, a large scale installation, which invited the viewers to find their path in the maze of an imaginary town. Now the artists invite the viewers in “The Dream City”, a summary of their life-time philosophy of art at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. The installation contain the works: “Manas”, “Fallen Angel”, “Dark Chapel”, “The Gates”, “20 ways to get an apple listening the music of Mozart” and “Empty Museum”, combining: architecture, lighting, sound, painting, urban planning, etc., the artworks of the Kabakovs invite the audiences to enter the maze of an imaginary world and lose themselves in art. Commenting on the installation, Emilia Kabakov said: “Some years ago, someone asked us if we thought that art could influence politics. We answered no. Our opinion has not changed, but during all these years, we have worked with ideas based around the imaginary and utopia. We sincerely believe that art, which occupies an important place in our culture, can change the way we think, dream and act. It can change the way we live. This time, we would like to create more than an installation; we would like to conceive something very different. Constructing The Dream City is to insist on the experience rather than on the form of a project, it is to ask you to slow down in your real life, to call on your emotions, your senses and your memories. We invite you to come to the Power Station of Art to enter The Dream City, a fantastic space born of a collective imagination, and to think and reflect about art, culture, the daily life and our present and our future”. As a Russian artist who lived through Stalinism and the Cold War, and worked inside and outside the official Soviet art system, Kabakov has the gift for sharp critical observation. He imagines all sorts of characters suffering from disorders and traumas. In “The Fallen Angel”, an angel lays crushed, his body surrounded by a police cordon to keep people away. The fallen angel is helpless on the ground, his face turned downward, his body is covered with a plastic sheet that reveals his feet. His fall could be viewed as the crumbling of mankind’s firm belief system, marking the beginning of the Utopian dream. “Manas” is a mythical Tibetan utopia that depicts “a city that exists simultaneously on two planes – the celestial plane and the earthly plane”. Is built in the top of eight mountains surrounding a lake of light and extends to eight mirror image mountains hanging from the ceiling, which likewise surround a circle of light, perhaps a lunar crater. Like the various chambers, sculptures and pools of an ancient Chinese garden, all eight mountains have their own names, imbuing them with power and intention. The Tibetan Plateau has its position in the Western fantasies for over a century, is larger in our imaginations than our understanding. It literally exists on a higher plane than almost anywhere, seeming close to heaven. In another religious work called “The Dark Chapel”, the artist decorated a large space evoking the Italian chapels of the renaissance with six epic paintings that blend his personal memories and Soviet imagery with the style of baroque painting.Through repetitive and reversed images on the canvas, the artist reveals a disordered adventure through the past and future.

Info: The Dream City, Curator: Jean-Hubert Martin, Power Station of Art, 200 Huayuangang Rd., Shanghai, Duration: 8/8-6/12/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun: 11:00-19:00, www.powerstationofart.com