Ilya Kabakov

This catalogue presents the artwork of three fictitious Russian artists, all inventions of Ilya Kabakov, and intervviews of Ilya Kabakov.

An illustrated study of one of Ilya Kabakov's most fantastic installations. The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet utopia, in which where cosmic vision and the political project of the Communist revolution are seen as indissoluble. The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment also raises questions of authorship in modernity. All of Kabakov's work is made in the name of other, fictitious artists. This reveals a hidden rule of the modern art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist—just as only an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The installation is a narrative, the documentation of a fictitious event. Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages. Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists. This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.

"Matthew Jesse Jackson's writing and quality of mind put him in the forefront of the next wave in modern art studies." Thomas E. Crow, Institute of Fine Arts --

This is the first comprehensive monograph on an important contemporary artist, one who has come to represent the Russian avant-garde in the post-Stalinist era much in the way that Joseph Beuys was a stimulus for European art after World War II. In her fascinating text, Amei Wallach draws on extensive research and interviews with Kabakov and his circle over the past eight years, and puts the work in the context of the artist's life and the social, historical, cultural, and political forces that have shaped it - from his boyhood during Stalin's regime, to his obligatory career as a children's book illustrator in the official Artists' Union, to his involvement in Moscow's furtive and fertile underground avant-garde of artists and writers, to his more recent travels in the international art circuit. This groundbreaking volume also includes an introduction by Robert Storr, a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and commentaries by the artist himself that accompany the 290 illustrations, including paintings, drawings, albums, and sketches and photographs of installations.

A TLS Book of the Year 2017 In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country’s most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region’s contemporary art, culture and and theory. With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vibrant and complex culture: one built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories and ideologies.

Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels, Kabakov and Pivovarov’s albums were also the basis for unique performance pieces, as the artists invited select audiences to their Moscow apartments for private readings and viewings of the albums, helping to cultivate an alternative artistic community in the process. This exhibition catalog brings together Kabakov and Pivovarov’s key works for the first time, putting the two artists in dialogue and recreating their artistic community. It not only includes nearly hundred pages of full-color illustrations, but also provides complete English translations of the Russian texts that appear in the volume, plus new interviews with each artist. Taken together, they give viewers a new appreciation of the different aesthetic strategies each artist used to depict the absurdities of everyday life in the Soviet era. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.

The exhibition catalogue "Gina Osterloh: Mirror Shadow Shape" will accompany an exhibition of thesame name at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio. This catalogue will be the first full monograph and survey of artist Gina Osterloh's work. Osterloh, a Filipino-American artist, uses photography to mine her own history to pose questions about identity that are both intellectually and aesthetically compelling to wider audiences. Both the exhibition and its catalogue focus on the cogent development of ideas set forth by Osterloh in photographic series that span a period of fifteen years (2005-2020). Osterloh's practice is unique for how it has seamlessly blended photography, film, performance, anddrawing-creating a sustained engagement with a rigorous set of questions across radically differentmanifestations. The series Osterloh has made throughout her career to date have unfolded like a series ofpropositions. Her early work with photographic tableaus quite literally set the stage for what would become a fixation with abstraction: figures flatten into silhouettes whose forms are covered by the same patternedbackdrops into which they are set; bodies are emptied of viscera and filled with paper; and heads are turneddown and away from the camera, becoming faceless portraits. While these works challenge photographicconventions, however, they also engage self-reflexively with the medium's history. The catalogue will be richly illustrated with full color plates and include a foreword by Tyler Cann,Director of Exhibitions and Pizzuti Family Curator of Contemporary Art of the Columbus Museum of Art; anintroductory essay by Anna Lee, the exhibition curator; an academic essay by art historian Ellen Tani; anartist conversation/interview between Osterloh and artist Sheilah ReStack; and chronology with key works,concepts, and events in Osterloh's career.

In this short book, I would like to share with you some things I learned along the way that have taught me to live and eat well for less.

EARLY LEARNING: FIRST WORD BOOKS. Enjoy reading first words to your baby, with beautiful illustrations of everyday objects. Your baby will love the stylish illustrations and the shiny coloured foil on every page. Black and white board books are perfect for helping your baby to identify first objects and their very first words. The eye catching foil design will ensure these books will continue to be well loved throughout their first few formative years. Age 0+