A TLS Book of the Year 2017In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country's most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region's contemporary art, culture and and theory.With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Ox...

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages.Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russi...

Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and no...