Curated by Juliet Bingham with Katy Wan

This retrospective will present a melancholy variation amid the year’s bountiful exhibitions dedicated to the centennial of the Russian Revolution. The Kabakovs are known for their virtuosic exploration of the gap between utopian promises and the humiliating minutiae of Soviet everyday life. Comprising more than one hundred objects and accompanied by an extensive catalogue, the exhibition begins with Ilya’s central role in Moscow Conceptualism and includes three ambitious installations. Its subtitle (named after one of the installations) derives from an episode, imagined by Ilya, in which Kazimir Malevich selected the artists who would—or would not—be taken into the future. Yet the topicality of the Kabakovs’ trademark pathos may lie in this statement’s inverse. The revolutionary potential of the best known of their works (think of The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1985) reminds us that everyone will be taken into some future, but that we may very well want out. 

— Kristin Romberg