PREVIEW: Ilya & Emilia Kabakov-Between Heaven and Earth

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are globally recognized as the premier artists to emerge from the former Soviet Union and remain major figures on the international art scene. Working between painting, sculpture, prints, installations and total installations, the Kabakovs long collaborated on producing environments that fuse the everyday with conceptual and visionary elements. While their work is deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context in which the Kabakovs came of age, their work still holds a deeply universal significance.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Oakville Galleries Archive

Oakville Galleries presents the exhibition “Between Heaven and Earth” and the project “The Ship of Tolerance”, by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov. The opening on will feature a concert by young performers, presented in Gairloch Gardens.  The exhibition “Between Heaven and Earth” is presented at both our locations. This exhibition highlights a number of the artists’ works, including paintings, prints and installations, and spills out into the gardens with several larger artworks. The largest installation is “The Ship of Tolerance”, an 18.5 meter  long, hand-crafted wooden ship with sails made from children’s paintings, presented lakeside in Gairloch Gardens for one year. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, its first appearance in Canada takes place at a critical time where a crossroads towards a new global order is visible. In Oakville, over 1300 children from local schools and diverse community groups have played a part in creating this project to date. These young participants converse together about inclusivity, different cultures, respect and creative ideas of the future. They create paintings that express their visions of tolerance and how that influences robust notions of humanitarianism in society. A selection of their resulting paintings are sewn together to create the ship’s sail, while the remaining paintings are displayed in Oakville locations.  Among the historic installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are: “The Eminent Direction of Thoughts” (2017): The viewer enters a dark narrow room where the beam of a single ceiling lightbulb illuminates a chair which has brightly colored threads emanating from it that head upwards towards obscurity. The meaning of this installation is somehow ‘mystical’ and can only be understood if you manage to separate the space in which it is exhibited from the rest of the museum. This is what we define a total installation. “Concert for a Fly (Chamber Music)”  (1986): At the center of the installation a paper fly hangs from the ceiling. Twelve empty chairs and lecterns are placed in a circle around it. On each lectern there is a white sheet of paper with drawings, texts and musical scores. Everything acts as a focal point, directing our gaze upwards. The viewer waits in a state of anticipation, as if at the beginning of a concert. What is the fly doing suspended at the center of the circle? Is it getting ready to conduct the musicians one they have taken their places? Or has the concert already started, and it is suspended in the air, immobile, enraptured by the lovely music and completely oblivious, thinking that the concert is being held for it, maybe even in its honor? “I Will Return on April 12…” (1990)” At the center of the room there is a large sheet of packing paper with a dark blue sky covered in white clouds painted on it in oils. The ‘sky’ spread on the floor is in front of the viewer. Alongside it is an old chair with a jacket, trousers, a shirt, an undershirt, underpants and socks neatly folded on the back of it and, under the chair, a pair of old boots; in a word, the simple outfit of a person who has undressed and…? How often would we like to take flight from the earth with no planes, balloons or even ordinary wings! Flight, from the earth to the sky, does not just represent the movement from the confines between reality and the imagination, but is also a reminder of Soviet communist society. A society which keeps its people trapped in the confines between the lived community and the dreamed individuality, in which the imagination is often the only means to withstand a depressing reality. “The Fallen Chandelier” (1997): The work consists of two elements that are connected both spatially and in terms of meaning: a chandelier lies on the floor with various pieces of shattered glass around it and a ‘snapped’ metal cable and electric wire dangle from the ceiling. The fallen chandelier, with its sad murmuring, makes the words of Blaise Pascal resound in us: “We remain human as long as we preserve our memory”. This project speaks about humanity and romanticism, and about their gradual disappearance from our daily life. It also speaks of a time in which human beings, when constructing their homes and workplaces, always included beauty and sensitivity in everything they did, so that the two elements constantly surrounded them. “How to Meet an Angel” (2003): The video installation  animates a drawing by the Kabakovs in which a figure climbs a wooden ladder towards the sky where he meets an angel who appears from among the clouds. The meeting between the man and the angel happens through the light screened onto the building wall, whose architecture dialogues with the drawn landscape. The work anticipates and denounces the loss of spirituality and the supremacy of materialism, but at the same time exhorts the individual to moral improvement, absolute awareness and spiritual realization.

Photo: Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, The Ship of Tolerance, Photo Courtesy Oakville Galleries

Info: Curator: Séamus Kealy, Oakville Galleries, 1306 Lakeshore Road East & 120 Navy Street, Oakville, ON, Canada, Duration: 31/5-20/9/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, www.oakvillegalleries.com/