Emilia Kabakov

May 5, 2025
Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago

The Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts is pleased to invite Emilia Kabakov to The University of Chicago to deliver this year’s Deborah Goodman Davis and Gerald Davis Lecture.

Born in the Soviet Union in 1945, Emilia Kabakov attended the Music College in Irkutsk in addition to studying Spanish language and literature at the Moscow University. She left the Soviet Union in 1973 and eventually arrived in New York in 1975, where she worked as a curator and an art dealer. She began working side by side with her future husband, the artist Ilya Kabakov, beginning in the late 1980s and together have since gone on to receive numerous honors and awards, been awarded a multitude of public art projects, and have had their artwork acquired by public collections worldwide. 

While their work is deeply rooted in the Soviet social and cultural context in which the Kabakovs came of age, their work still attains a universal significance, collaborating on environments which activate elements of the everyday with our imagination. A lived-in apartment room with a giant hole ripped across the ceiling as evidence of a human flying off into space, a typical museum room that is too small to contain a significant scale increase of paintings and giant humans, a wooden ship sailing the world uniting children from different backgrounds, socio-economic classes, and religions.  

For the past twenty years, Ilya and Emilia have run The Ship of Tolerance, an international art project that unites children from different backgrounds, socio-economic classes, and religions. The project has been realized in Egypt, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, the United States, Cuba, Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Greece. In 2025, it will be realized in Canada, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia.