Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Presents a Documentary Film on Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

To mark Ilya Kabakov’s 85th birthday, Garage has produced a documentary film on the life and work of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the star duo of Russian contemporary art.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Garage are long-time collaborators. The Museum, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, opened with the artists’ retrospective exhibition in 2008. A decade later, Garage, with the support of its co-founder Roman Abramovich, is releasing a documentary about the Kabakovs. Directed by Anton Zhelnov, Poor Folk. Kabakovs takes its name from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel published in Russia and reflects the Kabakovs’ choice of characters for their works: ordinary people and the small dramas of their life in the Soviet Union.

In Poor Folk, Ilya Kabakov talks about his sources and influences, including the tragic life of his mother, which had a profound effect on his views and artistic career. Together with his wife and collaborator Emilia he discusses Soviet underground art, the birth of Moscow Conceptualism, the couple’s emigration to the USA, and international acclaim after thirty years of almost no exhibitions (Kabakov did not show his work at state-sanctioned exhibitions in the Soviet Union): today the duo’s works are in the world’s leading museums, including MoMA, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Hamburger Kunsthalle.

The documentary was filmed over 2017 and 2018 at the Kabakovs’ home on Long Island (USA) and in St. Petersburg. It includes previously unpublished photographs and videos from their personal archive and from Garage Archive Collection.

Anton Zhelnov commented: "We visited the Kabakovs on Long Island twice. The result was twenty hours of recorded conversations. I was very happy to work on the film with Mikhail Krichman, who I believe to be the best cinematographer in Russia. And, of course, it was great have access to places which hadn’t been filmed before: to see the studio and the way Ilya and Emilia work. We came every day at 7 a.m. and watched the paintings being made. We also worked with their personal and professional archives from before and after their emigration. Some of those materials will be shown for the first time.”

The premiere of Poor Folk. Kabakovs takes place on September 6 at Garage Screen summer cinema as a part of the CENTER Festival, which is organized by the Center for Documentary Cinema.

The film will be released on September 13, 2018.

Film crew

Director: Anton Zhelnov

Cinematography: Mikhail Krichman

Camera operators: Aleksei Kurbatov, Dmitry Krylov, Artur Bergart

Sound: Viktor Malov

Music: Andrei (Oid) Antonets, Nikolay Kartoziya

Producer: Natalya Golodova

Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933, Dnepropetrovsk) is the most acclaimed contemporary artist from Russia, one of the key figures in the history of Moscow Conceptualism, and the inventor of the total installation. After graduating in drawing from the Surikov Moscow Art Institute in 1951, he worked as an illustrator of children’s books and magazines. In the 1960s, he started showing his work at underground art exhibitions and experimenting with drawing. In the 1980s, he began making installations reflecting on Soviet communal life, the best-known being The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1982, Centre Georges Pompidou), which was the first of his total installations (large scale projects that implied working with large spaces). In the late 1980s, Kabakov became active on the European and American art scenes. His wife, artist Emilia Kabakov, became his permanent collaborator. The artists live and work on Long Island, USA. In Russia, they have had solo exhibitions at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; and Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow.

Emilia Kabakov (neé Lekach) was born in 1945 in Dnepropetrovsk. She was close to Ilya’s family from childhood and communicated with his mother her whole life. In the 1950s, Emilia studied at the Moscow music school, moving to the music college in Irkutsk in the 1960s, and on to Moscow University. In 1973, Emilia emigrated to Israel with her three-year-old daughter, moving to the United States in 1975, where she worked as a curator and art expert until she met Ilya Kabakov in the late 1980s. Ilya and Emilia have worked together since 1989.

Anton Zhelnov is a journalist, TV presenter, and documentary filmmaker. His films include Brodsky Is Not a Poet (with Nikolay Kartoziya, TEFI Prize for Best Documentary, 2015) and Sasha Sokolov. The Last Russian Writer (with Nikolay Kartoziya, Lavr Prize for Best Television Film, 2017).