The exhibition "Landscapes of an Ongoing Past" (Salt Warehouse, August 16–September 22, 2024) establishes a dialogue between a major work by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and a younger generation of artists from former socialist Eastern Europe on the premises of Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since 2001, The Palace of Projects by the Kabakovs has been installed in the Salzlager (salt warehouse) of the preserved coking plant and industrial processing complex, an impressive site of cultural heritage located in Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia. The two-story, snail shell-like artwork, made of simple wood and linen, holds 61 proposals for a better future and is one of the Kabakovs’ largest permanent installations. In loose correspondence with it, existing as well as newly commissioned artworks by 17 artists explore traces of unrealized utopias, focus on questions of artisanal and industrial production, or reflect on the relationship between architecture and nature.

In September 2025 the Centre Pompidou is due to close its doors for the next five years. [...] So before it’s too late, why not visit or revisit this French gem for a tour of the permanent collections of contemporary art. [...]The final episode of this feast of monumental installations is a new one. The Kabakovs, husband and wife duo Emilia (born in 1945) and Ilya (1933-2023), who created their artworks together, probably share one of the best known names in Russian contemporary art. They recently donated a series of five monumental works to the Centre Pompidou which, as usual, implicitly critique Russian totalitarian society, in this case from bygone days.

“Stars suddenly floated, the earth shrank terribly, and I felt myself uncertain on the surface of this small ball. I saw that space was coming up from behind me, together with my planet, and my brain began to explode from horror.” said Ilya Kabakov. The same experience of cosmic horror is essential to the medium of total installation, with which the Kabakov name is so closely associated. Methodologically speaking, it might be said that all of the Ilya and Emilia Kabkov's duo’s installations are in some way or another connected with a special structured experience of space, echoing the transformations of the starry sky. But there is one installation in which the sky also becomes the center of gravity. We are talking about perhaps their most famous installation, "The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment", first shown in the Kabakovs’ Moscow studio in 1985.

Nach den Terroranschlägen der Hamas wurde das Tel Aviv Museum of Art geschlossen. Nun kann man dort wieder eine Restrospektive von Ilya und Emilia Kabakov besuchen ("Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Tomorrow We Fly", Tel Aviv Museum of Art, bis 24. Januar). Ihre skeptische, aber menschenfreundliche Kunst erscheint notwendiger denn je Endlich davonfliegen: Wahrscheinlich war es der Traum, der Enge und Schwere der irdischen Verhältnisse zu entfliehen, der die Sowjetunion über sieben Jahrzehnte ideell zusammenhielt. Nicht zufällig beginnen schon Marc Chagalls Figuren um 1917, als die Revolution erst anbricht, abzuheben. [...] Auch Ilya und Emilia Kabakovs monumentales Gemälde "Flying" steht in dieser geistigen Tradition. Das derzeit in Tel Aviv ausgestellte Bild verbindet Chagalls poetische Verwandlung des Alltags ein Stück weit mit dem Machbarkeitspathos der Sowjetmacht. Das 2022 vollendete, über acht Meter breite Bild zeigt, wie eine unüberschaubare Menschenmenge ihrem irdisch-dörflichen Dasein davonfliegt.

The first large exhibition of the groundbreaking Russian-born, American-based artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, opened this week at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (from July 18, 2023 to January 20, 2024.), some six weeks after Ilya’s death. Considered to be the most famous artists of their generation to have emerged from the Soviet Union, the couple had wanted to have an exhibition in Israel for a long time, said curator Shahar Molcho, who worked with the Kabakovs on this exhibition for the last two years. 

Ilya Kabakov, an artist whose expansive works sharply directed their aim at the imploded dreams of the Soviet Union, ushering in new possibilities for installation art in the process, died on Saturday at 89. His death was announced by his family that same day. In vast installations, Kabakov took up the many failures of the Soviet Union, where he lived for decades before departing for the West. By building out the worlds of imagined characters via room-size artworks, Kabakov offered heightened versions of the reality he lived for viewers across the globe.

“The Ukrainian Museum has been around for 46 years. It started no differently than a lot of museums in New York; the one that comes to mind is the Jewish Museum, which started as an immigrant museum—same thing here—then 30 or 40 years ago they moved beyond that. We started that process a few years ago, and we're moving beyond being an immigrant museum to embrace everything that has to do with Ukrainian art and culture,” says Doroshenko. “Obviously the war has shed a giant spotlight with what that is.”