Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Happiest Man, Ambika P3

Ambika P3 is a windowless, cavernous basement once used to test concrete for huge building projects – the Channel Tunnel among them – now ingeniously recycled as a kunsthalle gallery / performance space.  Thus it is strikingly appropriate for its current incarnation.

We are in a cinema, with rows and rows of old-fashioned, surprisingly comfortable, plush red seats. On the screen showing in that syrupy sticky colour of the 1930s-50s there are hordes of horribly happy peasants: handsome sweaty young men and kerchiefed lipsticked dewy-skinnned young women, all singing at the tops of their voices in Russian. The singing is gorgeous, of course; put a Russian in a choir and they do sing their hearts out. And in this case it’s the secular religion of communism and collectivism that is being ritualised and worshipped.

The shabby timeworn room is exactly how a Westerner might imagine a communal room in a Russian city apartment

This 20-minute loop of clips from three decades of propaganda films from Soviet Russia shows us well-nourished – naturally, no hints of great famines here – hysterically euphoric agricultural workers, singing to each other as they are transported in horse drawn carts, or are sailing on big river boats piled high with rudimentary possessions, or bouncing about on threshing machines or raking grain. 

These anonymous movies are awe-inspiring in their demented single-mindedness. Only the vast stormy skies which occasionally overarch the fertile and horribly dusty endless steppes are seeminly beyond the touching-up skills of the film makers.

You don’t have to sit in the cinema; you can visit an all-purpose living room that has also been installed, where you'll find an aperture through which you can watch the films. The shabby timeworn room is exactly how a Westerner might imagine a communal room in a Russian city apartment: multifunctional, dreary, yet curiously dignified in its pathos. I can testify to its authenticity having toured several timewarp installations still preserved in Moscow and St Petersburg. The room has a small dining table, a couch, some worn-out wooden cabinets. A single bed indicates the cycles of the day, and the pictures on the wall and the films visible through the window indicate some kind of optimism – hope, desire, however misplaced or unrealistic.

Kabakov, who married Emilia after he had come to the West, and formed a partnership analogous to that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude – the man the working artist, the imagination, the maker, the woman the enabler, administrator, the intellectual collaborator – was oppressed but not unduly compared to many artists.  He worked as a children’s illustrator and he collaborated quietly with other avant-garde artists but was slapped down when he raised his head above the parapet. The West has enabled him to work obsessively with paintings, installations, vast sculptures, all hinting not only at fables but at the gaps, the cracks, between aspiration and reality, and in particular the hideous disjunction between ideas of utopia and individual hopes and dreams. In the process, subtly savage as his work is, the Kabakovs have become, in a fascinating irony, successful both commercially and critically well beyond most artists’ wildest dreams, as well as honoured in their homeland.  

The Happiest Man makes visible without words both societal failure and indomitable survival. And it does all this with a hypnotic and inescapable visual wit: the films are almost unbearable yet peculiarly gripping, hilarious and poignant. The room makes us want to meet someone who might have lived there.

• Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Happiest Man at Ambika P3, University of Westminster, until 21 April
• New paintings by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are also on show at Sprovieri until 11 May