Ilya Kabakov

Dina Vierny is a renowned French gallerist, art historian and the muse of sculptor Aristide Maillol. In the French art community, Dina Vierny was highly regarded for her refined taste and broad-mindedness. During the war years she participated in the Resistance movement. In the 1970s, it was she who exposed Soviet conceptual artists to the West. In the movie take part: Aristide Maillol's nephew Yvon Berta-Maillol, artists Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Vladimir Yankilevsky. Dina Vierny herself talks about her life.

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: enter here est un double portrait sur les vies et le travail des artistes russes les plus reconnus à l’international, aujourd’hui citoyens américains. Deux décennies après sa fuite d’Union Soviétique, Ilya Kabakov surmonte ses peurs et met en place six installations traversantes dans des lieux comme le Musée Pouchkine à Moscou, là même où il lui était jadis interdit d’exposer son art. Plongé dans la cacophonie d’une ville et d’un pays en pleine transition, il doit faire face aux souvenirs qui ont fait de lui qui il est. Grâce à un accès exceptionnel aux artistes et à l’ensemble de la communauté de leurs amis et observateurs, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: enter here explore les moyens par lesquels l’art peut faire fi de l’oppression, illuminer l’avenir et transcender son époque.

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.

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.”