By DCist contributor Blair Murphy

As a summer of discontent turns into a fall that promises more of the same, a new show at the Hirshhorn offers a hopeful vision of human potential and resilience, tempered by an acknowledgement of earthly limitations.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Projects presents a beguiling, hopeful perspective as seen through a dry and occasionally skeptical lens. The exhibition includes nearly two dozen precisely constructed maquettes, proposals for ambitious installations and public projects that have or could be executed on a large-scale. Gathered together around the Hirshhorn’s inner ring, the models function as sculptures and manifestations of their creators’ fantastical imaginations, as well as their commitment to optimism in the face of hardship.

The 83-year old artist Ilya Kabakov and his wife Emilia, 12 years his junior, were born in Dnepropetrovsk in the Soviet Union. Ilya was closely affiliated with—and has become the most recognized former member of—the Moscow Conceptualists, a tightly-knit group of artists working outside official Soviet state channels during the last few decades before the USSR collapsed. He left Moscow in the mid-1980s, living throughout Europe and eventually moving to New York. The two artists have worked collaboratively since they married in 1992.

The earliest works in the show, from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, draw inspiration from the coping mechanisms devised by ordinary citizens to survive life under Soviet repression. The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment was originally executed in 1989. In the maquette, a half boarded-up door leads to a small room, wallpapered with Soviet propaganda posters. A room-sized slingshot fills the middle of the space and the ceiling of the small room is torn apart, as if the apartment’s occupant has taken drastic steps to escape his suffocating surroundings. The full scale installation of the work was presented at the Hirshhorn in 1990, as part of one of Ilya Kabakov’s first museum exhibitions in North America.

Originally created as a full-scale installation for Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany in 1992, The Toilet is also presented at the Hirshhorn in maquette form. Patrons who entered the full-scale installation encountered a living space that mimicked a typical Soviet apartment, and this provoked anger from some Russian visitors who felt the Kabakovs dishonored their homeland. In Emilia’s telling, their angered compatriots misread the work’s use of metaphor and its dry affection. “We live in a country that is a toilet, but it is still our home,” she explained during a tour of the exhibition, “This doesn’t just apply to Russia, it could be said of many different countries.”

Later works continue the Kabakov’s exploration of human resilience, but with an eye towards more universal experiences and what Emilia Kabakov calls the aspiration to “surpass the conditions of our existence”. The work acknowledges both the potential for and impossibility of human transcendence. How Can One Change Oneself? includes a set of instructions, a pair of wings attached to a harness, and a drawing of a figure wearing the wings. Instructions recommend that those seeking self-improvement wear the wings while sitting in solitude and silence for 5 to 10 minutes, several times a day. The practice will lead wearers to become better, kinder, and more decent.

How to Meet an Angel proposes a 3,300 foot ladder that one might climb in order to encounter a heavenly being. The piece exists as a maquette and has been executed in multiple large-scale installations in Europe. In a sense, even the large scale versions of How to Meet an Angel are models-fantastical and unexecutable plans for transcending physical reality.

The logic of the maquettes fits so well into the Kabakov’s larger project that the exhibition’s format—a show made up entirely of models—feels like an organic extension of their practice, rather than a limitation. Despite their small scale, the maquettes embody the artist’s ambition, humor, and optimism.

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Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Project is at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden through March 4, 2018.A number of the works in the show feature lights and moving parts which will be activated every day at 1pm.