Ilya Kabakov, "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment"

Ilya Kabakov, "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment", 1985.
Photo from Kunstkritikk.

Ilya Kabakov creates installations that tell stories from the lives of fictional characters. "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment" consists of two rooms: The hallway in a communal Soviet apartment, and the room from which the story's protagonist has taken off into space through the ceiling and the roof, using the catapult he has made by attaching a seat to bed springs and rubber bands.

Ilya Kabakov, "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment", 1985.
Photo from Cold War Art.

The walls in his very simple room have propaganda posters plastered all over. There are also sketches of his contraption and his expected orbit, and he has made a model of his town and apartment building, from which a metal string indicates his flight into space.

Ilya Kabakov, "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment", 1985.
Photo from comixcube.

In the grimly lit hallway outside his room, yellowing pages tell the following story:

The lovely inhabitant of this room, as becomes clear from the story his neighbors tells, was obsessed by a dream of a lonely flight into space, and in all probability, he realized this dream of his, his "grand project".

The entire cosmos, according to the thoughts of the inhabitant of this room, was permeated by streams of energy leading upward somewhere. His project was conceived in an effort to hook up with these streams and fly away with them.
A catapult, hung from the corners of the room, would give this new "astronaut", who was sealed in a plastic sac, his initial velocity and further up, at a height of 40-50 meters, he would land in a stream of energy through which the Earth was passing at that moment as it moved along its orbit.
[...]
Everything takes place late at night, when all the other inhabitants of the communal apartment are sound asleep. One can imagine their horror, fright, bewilderment. The local police are summoned, an investigation begins, and the tenants search everywhere, in the yard, on the street, but he is nowhere to be found.

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 "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment" is part of the exhibition Take Me to Your Leader! at Bergen Art Museum (until May 8, 2011).