Thanks
Based on the ideas of Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov, Anton Vidokle’s film was shot in Siberia, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. Fedorov, like others, believed that death was a mistake, “because the energy of cosmos is indestructible, because true religion is a cult of ancestors, because true social equality is immortality for all.” Fedorov was one of the Cosmo-Immortalists, a surge of thinkers that emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They linked Western Enlightenment with Russian Orthodoxy and Eastern philosophical traditions, as well as Marxism, to create an idiosyncratically concrete metaphysics. For the Russian cosmists, cosmos did not mean outer space: rather, they wanted to create “cosmos” on earth. “To construct a new reality, free of hunger, disease, violence, death, need, inequality – like communism.”
Himself
Like the Kabakovs' evocative art, 'Ilya and Emilia KABAKOV: ENTER HERE' has the sweep of a Russian novel and the immediacy of a family drama. It probes art's ability to transcend oppression and exile. With extraordinary access, the film follows the Soviet-born international art luminaries, now U.S. citizens, to Putin's Moscow, as they come face to face with their catastrophic past in the dizzying present. For the first time, Ilya Kabakov has returned to the hometown where his art was once forbidden, to install seven magical walk-in installations with his wife and partner-in-art, Emilia. The action ranges from the high plains of Texas to a blighted neighborhood in the Ukraine and climaxes as a sea of flashbulbs illuminate the artists at an opening pronounced 'historic'.
Himself
Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and post-socialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into Russian everyday life, which itself sometimes appears like an installation by the artist.
