Photo: Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart, installation, 1997. Photo: Dejan Habicht, Moderna galerija
IN MEMORIAM | Ilya Kabakov (1933 – 2023)
It is with great sadness we announce the passing of Ilya Kabakov, one of the most prominent conceptual artists departing from the Soviet socio-cultural context, who spent most of his creative life in the West.
Kabakov was born in 1933 in the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, and emigrated in 1987 from Moscow to New York, where he lived for the rest of his life. Since 1988, he worked together with his wife Emilia.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov showed their work at important group exhibitions and biennials such as the Kassel documenta, the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale, the First Biennale in Kiev... They presented their work in Ljubljana for the first time at the Moderna galerija in 1995 with the installation The Story of a Culturally Relocated Man at the House in Time group exhibition, and then several times at the Arteast 2000+ Exhibitions, including the inaugural exhibition of the international Arteast 2000+ collection in 2000 at Metelkova. The Arteast 2000+ collection includes 10 of Kabakov’s albums and his 1997 installation Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s work can only be understood in the context of Soviet society: it is characterized by a strong narrative structure and utopian individual worlds formed within it. In an interview with Boris Groys, Kabakov offered: “Socialism is wonderful, but it should stay in Iofan’s and Mayakovsky’s utopias, and not be put into practice. It is beautiful, but from a distance. It will shine above us as an eternal utopia, evading us like the carrot dangled in front of the donkey. The experiences of the 20th century have made it manifest that it is better not to come too close to utopias. We cannot give them up, but we had better not even try to realize them.”
The installation Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart consists of twenty drawings and stories explaining the various tricks by which one can reach an apple in the middle of an enormous table, two or three arm’s lengths away.
It tells us that utopian worlds are always somewhere nearby, close at hand; we generally only fail to see the way to them. As Zdenka Badovinac put it: “The whiteness of the installation Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart is essentially the emptiness that represents the beginning and end of every journey Ilya and Emilia Kabakov take.”
