Ilya Kabakov-the Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment (1985)
This is probably the most widely known piece from the entire Soviet postwar period. One of Kabakov's "total installations" of the mid 1980s, the artist created a sealed off totality, free from any outside interference, with which to express a concept.
Kabakov created an entire atmosphere belonging to an imagined person, the so-called "man who flew into space from his apartment". Everything works to delineate a human existence, save for the body itself. It is as if the person in question simply got up and walked away from, or rather, catapulted out of, his apartment.
If one examines the details of Kabakov's installation, it becomes clear that no one piece of the installation means anything without its context in the entirety (This is another aspect of Kabakov's obsession with totality, but that's another story). Soviet propaganda is plastered on every inch of the walls, yet the room is sparsely furnished with rickety furniture, similar to real life Soviet apartments at the time. The catapult, beneath which lies a pair of the escapee's shoes, is a literal metaphor for the want of Kabakov (and perhaps every Soviet citizen) to transcend the masses and escape their mundane reality as cogs in the Soviet system. Kabakov expresses here a want for spiritual transcendence, a theme handled extensively by the artist throughout his career. This "total installation" is a physical emanation of such conceptualizations.