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10 January 2017 | By
09 January 2017 | By
Inside the Picture: Installation Art in Three Acts - by Jane A. Sharp
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Conversations with Andrei Monastyrski - by Sabine Hänsgen
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Thinking Pictures | Introduction - by Jane A. Sharp
15 November 2016 | By
31 October 2016 | By
Tatlin and his objects - by James McLean
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Housing, interior design and the Soviet woman during the Khrushchev era - by Jemimah Hudson
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Dressing the Soviet Woman Part 3: "Are Russians Women?" Vogue on Soviet Vanity - by Waleria Dorogova
18 May 2016 | By
Dressing the Soviet Woman Part 1 - by Waleria Dorogova
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Eisenstein's Circle: Interview With Artist Alisa Oleva
31 March 2016 | By
Mescherin and his Elektronik Orchestra - by James McLean
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SSEES Centenary Film Festival Opening Night - A review by Georgina Saunders
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Nijinsky's Jeux by Olivia Bašić
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Learning the theremin by Ortino
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Impressions of Post- Soviet Warsaw by Harriet Halsey
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Facing the Monument: Facing the Future
11 March 2015 | By Bazarov
'Bolt' and the problem of Soviet ballet, 1931
16 February 2015 | By Ivan Sollertinsky
Some Thoughts on the Ballets Russes Abroad
16 December 2014 | By Isabel Stockholm
Last Orders for the Grand Duchy
11 December 2014 | By Bazarov
Rozanova and Malevich – Racing Towards Abstraction?
15 October 2014 | By Mollie Arbuthnot
Cold War Curios: Chasing Down Classics of Soviet Design
25 September 2014 | By
Walter Spies, Moscow 1895 – Indonesia 1942
13 August 2014 | By Bazarov
'Lenin is a Mushroom' and Other Spoofs from the Late Soviet Era
07 August 2014 | By Eugenia Ellanskaya
From Canvas to Fabric: Liubov Popova and Sonia Delaunay
29 July 2014 | By Alex Chiriac
My Communist Childhood: Growing up in Soviet Romania
21 July 2014 | By Alex Chiriac
Monumental Misconceptions: The Artist as Liberator of Forgotten Art
12 May 2014 | By Rachel Hajek
28 April 2014 | By Rachel Hajek
An Orgy Becomes a Brawl: Chagall's Illustrations for Gogol's Dead Souls
14 April 2014 | By Josephine Roulet
KINO/FILM | Stone Lithography Demonstration at the London Print Studio
08 April 2014 | By Alex Chiriac
24 March 2014 | By Renée-Claude Landry
Book review | A Mysterious Accord: 65 Maximiliana, or the Illegal Practice of Astronomy
19 March 2014 | By Rosie Rockel
Leading Ladies: Laura Knight and the Ballets Russes
10 March 2014 | By Bazarov
Exhibition Review | Cash flow: The Russian Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale
03 March 2014 | By Rosie Rockel
24 February 2014 | By Ellie Pavey
Guest Blog | Pulsating Crystals
17 February 2014 | By Robert Chandler Chandler
Theatre Review | Portrait as Presence in Fortune’s Fool (1848) by Ivan Turgenev
10 February 2014 | By Bazarov
03 February 2014 | By Paul Rennie
Amazons in Australia – Unravelling Space and Place Down-Under
27 January 2014 | By Bazarov
Exhibition Review | Siberia and the East, fire and ice. A synthesis of the indigenous and the exotic
11 December 2013 | By Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky
Shostakovich: A Russian Composer?
05 December 2013 | By Bazarov
Marianne von Werefkin: Western Art – Russian Soul
05 November 2013 | By Bazarov
Chagall Self-portraits at the Musée Chagall, Nice/St Paul-de-Vence
28 September 2013 | By Bazarov
31 July 2013 | By Richard Barling
Exhibition review | Lissitsky — Kabakov: Utopia and Reality
25 April 2013 | By Richard Barling
Exhibition review | Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Happiest Man
18 April 2013 | By Richard Barling
18 April 2013 | By Richard Barling
Presented by Sprovieri Gallery London and Ambika P3, 27 March – 21 April 2013
In London we confront dream and reality in a single, vast and depressing setting, the gloomy basement that is the University of Westminster’s P3 exhibition space. A single room, poorly furnished yet homely, huddles within a theatre auditorium. Through the window we view, as if in reality, propaganda films of alternately brisk and sentimental images from the farm, the music hall and the river boat. We are quickly embraced by these visions of progress and prosperity, we become the happiest man. Leaving the room we see the images for what they are, projected on a distant screen beyond the rows of empty seats, a celluloid Utopia, unreachable in practice.
Back in Eindhoven the red carpet leads us to Ilya Kabakov’s defining installation, a small room plastered with propaganda posters into which we can peer, through a broken wall, just like the astonished neighbours in one of the associated drawings. A contraption of springs and cords hangs beneath the jagged hole in the ceiling through which the hero of the narrative, in private emulation of Yuri Gagarin and the cosmonauts of the Soviet space programme (and there is perhaps also a reference here to the Christian Ascension), has propelled himself beyond the confines of reality into a new and perhaps brighter personal Utopia. Is he dead or alive? We do not know and we may guess that the artist does not know either. Now an immigrant himself, there is surely a degree of personal identification here between artist and narrative. The jaundiced yet nostalgic review of Soviet reality in the Kabakovs’ works shown here, the details of collective living as well as the magnificent but unrealised public projects, seems to be the view of artists who have rejected reality for a new Utopia in North America, but cannot quite let go of the socialist dream. Boris Groys writes of Ilya Kabakov’s ‘enlightened, sceptical attitude’, an artist for whom art is ‘about the chance to change existing circumstances or at least to escape them.’ To exchange one Utopia for another in fact.