NEW YORK, NY.- Film Forum will present the theatrical premiere of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here, a new documentary by the creators of Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine. Director Amei Wallach and editor/cinematographer Ken Kobland collaborate with Saint Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum to explore the fascinating lives and work of the Kabakovs, a husband-and-wife team who are Russia’s most acclaimed visual artists. Born in 1933 in the Ukraine — to a Jewish family during the famine artificially created by Stalin — Ilya Kabakov’s life changed when he literally stumbled into the Leningrad School of Art. The deprivation he and his mother suffered during this period serves as the emotional substrata of his art. In the Soviet Union he led a double life: as a successful state-approved illustrator and as a major unofficial artist, forbidden to exhibit his own art. Coming to the US in 1988, Ilya began to build three-dimensional spaces using the communal apartment as a metaphor for the intellectual, psychological and physical repression at the core of Soviet life. In 2005, he became the first living Russian artist to exhibit at the Hermitage Museum. An exhibition of the Kabakovs’ art opens in New York at the Pace Gallery, 32 East 57 Street, on Sat, November 2 and runs through December 21.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here will have a 2-week engagement, November 13 – 26, at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street (West of 6th Avenue), with screenings daily at 1:00, 3:15, 5:40, 7:50, and 10:00. Presented with support from the Joan S. Constantiner Fund for Jewish and Holocaust Film.

Ilya (b. 1933) and Emilia (b. 1945) Kabakov collaborate on environments that are deeply rooted in the Soviet cultural context in which they came of age and that fuse elements of the everyday with the conceptual. Their work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Tate (London), the Pompidou Centre (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), as well as many other major museums worldwide.

Ilya Kabakov is “one of the 10 greatest living artists.” – ARTnews

“The most famous and original artists to have come out of the former USSR.”
– Manchester Guardian (UK)

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE (2013, 103 mins.) Produced and Directed by Amei Wallach. Cinematographer/Editor: Ken Kobland. Co-producer: Kipjaz Savoie. Additional cinematography: Mead Hunt. In collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Presented by Festival “Diaghilev.P.S.” and JTI. USA/Russia. In English, Russian, and German with English subtitles.