Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine, on September 30, 1933. He was the son of a locksmith and an accountant. When the disruptions of World War II separated his family, he and his mother fled to Samarkand, where the relocated Leningrad Academy of Arts provided Kabakov with his first formal art training. He later went on to study graphics and illustration at the Surikov Moscow State Institute of Art, and, after graduating, began a decades-long career as a children’s book illustrator—a practical role that concealed his intensely private and conceptual artistic practice. 

During the Soviet era, Kabakov worked in a cultural vacuum. His central Moscow studio became an underground hub for like-minded artists, writers, and philosophers, including Erik Bulatov, Viktor Pivovarov, Oleg Vassiliev, Boris Mikhailov, and Boris Groys, to name a few. With no access to public exhibitions, they operated in the shadows of internal emigration, inhabiting the system without ever fully participating in it. It was in this atmosphere that Kabakov began to develop what would become his unique artistic language: installations that incorporated text, architecture, narrative and imagination into immersive environments. These “total installations”—a term he coined—blurred the lines between fiction and reality, bureaucracy and faith, history and hallucination. 

As a former full-time assistant to Ilya Kabakov during my early years of emigration, I had the unique privilege of witnessing and participating in the vibrant world of conceptual art in New York City. This included meeting and engaging with artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Hans Haacke, Hanne Darboven, Rosemarie Trockel, Rebecca Horn, and Edward Kienholz, and contributing to the creation of many of Kabakov’s iconic installations worldwide, including The Palace of Projects, The Monument to the Lost Glove, and The Life and Creativity of Charles Rosenthal. My role allowed me to delve into art history and meet remarkable figures—an opportunity I never expected to have in such a short time. In addition to this, I gained profound insights into the conceptual work, technical complexity, and metaphysical foundations of Kabakov’s art.

These experiences inform my film, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into His Picture, which is built upon this behind-the-scenes knowledge. The film was inspired by a series of deep and honest conversations I had with Ilya during the pandemic lockdown—a period of reflection for both of us that ultimately led us to discuss this film a mere two months before his passing. Some of these talks were captured on film, forming the cornerstone of this project. 

The film will focus on Kabakov’s groundbreaking 1988 work, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment: a makeshift room in a Soviet-era tenement house outfitted with a homemade slingshot aimed at a hole in the ceiling, suggesting that the unseen protagonist has launched himself into space in a desperate act of metaphysical escape. This work, exhibited at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York as part of the exhibition Ten Characters, was a turning point for Kabakov, who had emigrated to the United States only a year prior. Ten Characters marked his explosive arrival on the world stage, poignantly addressing the psychological aftermath of life under communism—an experience Kabakov translated into absurdist allegories that were both deeply personal and universally resonant. Freed from the constraints of Soviet censorship, Kabakov’s installations grew to monumental proportions. Working alongside his wife, Emilia, he created vast, immersive worlds such as The Strange City, exhibited in 2014 at the Grand Palais in Paris. These works explored themes of alienation, surveillance, and utopia—concerns that remained relevant long after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Despite Ilya’s later return to painting, the Kabakovs’ influence has not diminished. Their major retrospectives—Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future (Tate Modern, State Hermitage Museum, Tretyakov Gallery) and The Utopian Projects (MoMA and Hirshhorn Museums)—have solidified their status as giants of postwar art.

Paralleling Kabakov’s legacy, my project—initially titled Argonaut of the Soviet Soul and later renamed to Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into His Picture—reimagines the characters from his installations, including Ilya himself. These anonymous voices who once populated his imagined Soviet interiors will now embark on a new stage. Far from the realm of the traditional documentary, the structure of this film evokes the experience of watching a play in a theater. Complete with intermissions, the film will be framed and staged as a performance, where archival footage, fictional reenactments, and visual metaphors unfold on a conceptual set rather than a conventional one. This performative aspect injects a speculative dimension into the film, honoring the characteristic blurred boundaries between fiction and reality present in much of Kabakov’s work. As someone once involved in creating the fictional environments inhabited by his imagined characters, I aim to reconstruct not just Kabakov’s biography but also the multifaceted inner landscape that fueled his art—echoing with themes of utopia, loss, and absurdity.