From 3 July 2024, the exhibition Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Monument to a lost civilization will be running in the General Staff building of the State Hermitage.

“Ilya Kabakov is perhaps the only Russian artist of the second half of the 20th century to have become a generally acknowledged world great. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov were all but the only people in the Western world to speak out publicly against breaking ties with Russian cultural institutions. In the General Staff building the total installation devoted to Soviet civilization has consonances with the displays devoted to the history of the previous – imperial – Russian civilization. Its protagonist, however, is the little man, the successor to personages from Gogol and Dostoyevsky”, Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are famous Conceptualist artists who have gone down in history as the creators of a new genre – the total installation. It is an artistic space filled with a specific atmosphere, a separate environment in which everything – not just individual objects, but also their surroundings, the colour and configuration of the walls, lighting, sound and smells – takes on fresh meanings and serves to intensify the image devised by the creators.

The total installation Monument to a lost civilization became one of the largest in the Kabakovs’ oeuvre. It was produced and first shown by its creators in Palermo in 1999. The total installation takes the form of the design for a utopian museum-city, something of which the artists had dreamed for many years. It was conceived as a memorial to the civilization in which they were born and spent the greater part of their lives – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Like archaeologists, the Kabakovs collected, described and systematized “shards” of that no longer extant civilization in their full-scale installations. Drawing on their personal experience and recollections, they designed their museum in such a way that, wandering through its various installation-rooms, viewers who had never seen that civilization would be able to form their own conception of it.

The installation presented in the exhibition contains detailed blueprints, layouts and pictorial impressions of this unrealized “super-total” museum-installation. In the centre of the hall there are models of it: an inside and outside view. Around those are eight showcases containing a description of the overall structure of the museum and its separate sections. Each installation-room has a corresponding stand hung on the walls of the hall. The artists did indeed construct many of those installations over the years as separate works, and today they can be found in museum collections all around the world. In the General Staff building, for example, visitors can see two installations from the lineup for the utopian Monument to a lost civilization: Life in the Cupboard and Toilet in the Corner.

Ilya and Emilia Kazakov made a gift of the total installation Monument to a lost civilization to the Hermitage in 2014, and now, after lengthy restoration, it is being put on public show for the first time.

In their installations Ilya and Emilia Kazakov operate with personal and collective memory, provoking us, the viewers, to also take a backward look. Engaging with some long familiar, yet forgotten object, a snatch of music or some typeface might plunge us into warm and pleasant, but on occasion painful and even traumatic, recollections of our own or our family’s past.

The exhibition curator is Marina Viktorovna Shults, head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art.

An illustrated brochure has been produced to accompany the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2024) with a foreword by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, and text by Marina Shults.