Kabakov’s Ship of Tolerance to dock in Moscow’s Gorky Park

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s Ship of Tolerance will arrive at Moscow’s Gorky Park on 7 September after docking in cities in Cuba, the US, Egypt, Italy, Switzerland and the UAE. The 18-metre-long ship is intended to reflect how different cultures understand tolerance; its sails are stitched together from paintings by hundreds of local schoolchildren from different social and ethnic backgrounds. The Kabakovs hope that by helping to create the ship, children around the world will learn about respecting different values and cultures.

The project began in 2005 when the Kabakovs invited a group of carpentry students from Manchester to build a replica of an old Egyptian ship in Siwa, an oasis in the Sahara desert, close to the Libyan border. The ship was then recreated in Venice in 2007 for the biennale and then against in 2009 in St Moritz, Switzerland, where it received the Cartier Award.

In Moscow, the Multimedia Art Museum and the Garage Centre for Contemporary Arts will collaborate to create the ship in time for September. In addition to a series of lectures on tolerance for schoolchildren, Garage will host workshops for young people to paint pictures for inclusion in the installation.

The Kabakovs have long been considered as leading figures of the Russian art movement of the 1980s. Over the past few decades, they have received several awards such as the Praemium Imperiale in 2008, a prize established by the Japan Art Association in 1989 to recognise achievements not covered by the Nobel prize and the Cartier Award.

They have been exhibited in leading international museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to name a few.