Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

The average Russian, says Ilya Kabakov, feels that Earth is the wrong place to live. His existence resembles that of an abandoned child who must enter an overcrowded stagecoach without a ticket. Therefore his thoughts revolve around the cosmos and consequently his only opportunities on earth lie in art, in the realisation of his personal fantasies, projects and dreams. Ilya Kabakov's artistic development is based on over 30 years of literary and branded project ideas expressed through paintings, illustrations, books and models. Through collaboration with his wife Emilia, Kabakov reached a higher level of precision in the planning and transposition of his ideas on 'construction', moving from utopian designs to buildings that can be physically entered - the transformation of earthly conditions to architecturally constructed but nonetheless fictive spaces.

Albion's 11,000sq foot gallery will present the Kabakovs' most impressive architectural installation to date: the transformation of an old disused coking plant into a 'Utopian City'.

The Utopian City project unfolds in the former Zollverein coking plant in Essen, hailed today as a masterpiece of modern industrial architecture. The site's physical geography and architectural fabric, with its two cooling towers, salt store, coal bunkers and impressive conveying bridges, is chosen here for the staging of seven themed projects made tangible to the viewer through constructions, drawings and models. These are subdivided into; The Palace of Projects, a place where Utopia becomes alive through fantasy and dream; The Artist's Archive, stressing the importance of the past resurrected through imagination and documents collected across epochs and places; The Realised Utopias, made possible through memory and the building of monumental memorials; The Vertical Opera, The Volcano Opera and Dante's Theatre, a reverence to the musical and literary world of Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Dante, three legendary historical figures; and finally, Energy of the Earth and Centre of Cosmic Energy, bringing our ideas from the smallest to the grandiose into action. For the Kabakovs, this magnificent transformation of the Zollverein pronounces the ultimate and final theme: 'installation' as a new artistic genre.

More than 40 designs and models, together with the drawings, texts and notebooks for a better world will be presented in this exhibition. A large, fully illustrated reference book on The Utopian City and Other Projects, produced in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and the Kunsthaus Zug, and edited by Thomas Kellein accompanies the exhibition. The film, 'The Utopian City' (23 mins) will be shown continuously during the duration of the show.

An exhibition of site-specific works by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The House of Dreams, will run concurrently at the Serpentine Gallery from October 19th.

Pressetext

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian City and other projects