Silences

Official illustrator of books in Post-Stalinist Soviet Russia, Ilya Kabakov took advantage of the relative relaxing of the cultural noose to develop a personal work. After leaving the Soviet Union in 1988 and under the influence of Conceptual art, he followed up his research, culminating in “total installations”. The latter staged the mediocrity of ordinary communal spaces blending them with personal memories both familiar and oppressive. In the monumental installation Labyrinth (My mother’s Album), a narrow hallway of 50 meters pushes us down a path of dirty, old-fashioned wallpaper, covered in dactylographic extracts of his mother’s memoirs, the narrative of a life of agony and pain. Poplar songs in the background guide us towards a cramped room piled with rubbish.

Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album), 1990
Installation, mixed technique; 13,90 x 10,35 m
Tate, purchase 2002

© Adagp, Paris 2009

Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, 1933 (Ilya) – Dnipropetovsk, 1945 (Emilia) – Live and work in Moscow and New York