#kabakovs

Ilya’s Ten Characters albums were a series of narrative drawings made from 1970-4. Each album revolves around the life of an imaginary figure, including commentaries by their friends and casual observers. The characters tend to be isolated and lonely artists, and their fantastical stories embody different strategies for survival within a totalitarian regime.

The drawings themselves depicted abstract internal and external spaces comprising lines and circles. Sometimes these were in the forms of the fly like mandala of an earlier painting. These abstract spaces could also become the grids used to structure their paintings, and how the spaces in their paintings covered. This grid structure is also applied or a reference to official documents, with their tables and grid structures.

I always find the phrase ‘strategies for survival’ quite exciting. I think it’s the suggestion of needing to analyse and understand the specific potential threats and dangers of a social or political environment. 

In a totalitarian regime this must be easy – i’m not being flippant, it’s the survival, and the strategies that enable that survival, that is difficult. In a society such as ours, the survival at a rudimentary level is easy, but perceiving the threats and dangers is harder, less easy to police. They may be intrinsic to living.  

When I think about that world in which my mother’s life passed’, Ilya has said, ‘what arises in my imagination is a long and semi-dark corridor which is twisted like a labyrinth, where behind each new turn, behind each bend, there is not a bright exit glimmering in the distance, but just the same grubby floor, the same grey, dusty, poorly painted walls illuminated by weak, 40-watt light bulbs.

this wonderful installation is a seemiongly unending, poorly lit corridor, decorated at regular and frequent intervals with typed excerpts from his mother’s reminiscences and uncle’s blurred black and white photographs of wintry city and parkland scenes.

his mother goes from temporary apartment to temporary apartment, town to town, administrative process to administrative process, job to job. along the way she loses family, an unloved husband departs, and she cares as best she can for her artistic son. at the end of her reminiscences her son has bought her an apartment – the first she’s had in her life – though that too is taken out from under her.

life is unending and without progress, and then it ends.

This is soon after she has said that the misery and the sadness of the past grows dim, and she is mainly only aware of her current comforts.