The Art of Installation in the work of Dmitri Prigov and Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

About

To accompany Calvert 22 Foundation’s Dmitri Prigov. Theatre of Revolutionary Action, investigate installation art and hear the exhibition’s curator Elizaveta Butakova-Kilgarriff in conversation with Katy Wan, Assistant Curator at Tate Modern.

The pair will discuss installation and the various approaches taken to the genre by Dmitri Prigov and by Russian-born artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, as well as the continued relevance of installation art in the present day.

They will be joined by Anthony Gardner, Head of School at the Ruskin School of Art and author of Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015), which examined the work of Kabakov (amongst others).

Dmitri Prigov was a genre-defying poet, artist, performer and leader of Moscow Conceptualism who created a number of “phantom installations” that were never realised, one of which will be created for the first time at the exhibition Dmitri Prigov. Theatre of Revolutionary Action, open at Calvert 22 Space 13 October – 17 December 2017. Find out more here.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are amongst the most celebrated artists of their generation, widely known for their large-scale installation and use of fictional personas. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future, open at Tate Modern 18 October 2017 – 28 January 2018, is the first UK exhibition dedicated to these pioneers of installation art. Find out more here.

Katy Wan has been Assistant Curator at Tate Modern since 2015, contributing towards exhibitions, acquisitions and displays. She has helped to realise the major touring exhibitions Mona Hatoum (Tate Modern, 2016) and The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam (Tate Modern, 2016), and is currently working towards the exhibition Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future (Tate Modern, 2017) – a collaboration between Tate Modern, the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Dr Elizaveta Butakova-Kilgarriff is an academic focussing on the Russian post-war avant-garde. In 2015 she completed her thesis entitled A-Ya Magazine: Soviet unofficial art between Moscow, Paris and New York, 1976-1986 at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Based on this research, in 2014, she curated the exhibition Paper Museums: Moscow Conceptualism in Transit at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Courtauld, UCL and the Ruskin. In 2016, she co-taught the MA ‘Global Conceptualisms’ at the Courtauld Institute.

Anthony Gardner is Head of the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, where he is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory and a Fellow of The Queen’s College. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, and is an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital (with Zdenka Badovinac and Eda Čufer), which was a finalist for the 2017 Alfred H Barr Award for best exhibition catalogue worldwide. His latest book, co-authored with Charles Green (University of Melbourne), is Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, published by Wiley-Blackwell in summer 2016.

In partnership with Tate Modern, the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, the Hermitage Foundation UK and the Dmitri Prigov Foundation.

Part of The Future Remains: Revisiting Revolution, a season marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution.

Booking terms: pay what you wish

For a limited number of our events, attendees can pay what they wish for admission via Eventbrite. The suggested admission fee is £5. Please follow the booking URL to finalise your order.