Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Tomorrow We Fly The artists' first solo exhibition in Israel at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov worked together as an artist duo in their Long Island home-studio from the late 1980s until Ilya's passing in May 2023. They are best known for their ambitious total installations—autonomous "sets" installed in museum halls, comprising architectural elements and paintings. Surrounding their visitors with visual and auditory stimuli, they furnish them with a direct, unmediated experience with another reality, largely drawn from everyday life in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
The installations created by the Kabakovs narrate situations of domination and oppression, reflecting the failure of the Communist Utopia. They raise fundamental questions about the status of past traditions in a revolutionary society, the power of artistic values to influence the individual's life and their chances to survive in the race to the future. As allegorical capsules, these questions surpass the realms of art, and are addressed to all human beings.
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Flying, 2022. Oil on canvas, 229×863 cm. © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
