The empty Museum

For the past three decades, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have specialised in making "total installations", many of which reimagine life in the former Soviet Union with a dark sense of absurdity. Their 2004 installation, The Empty Museum, replicates a room in a classical gallery, featuring a Bach soundtrack and deep red walls that are dramatically spot-lit. But where we might expect to find paintings on the walls, there are only pools of light. What has happened to the art? Haunted by absence, the Kabakovs' eerily theatrical installation invites us to write our own script.

                                     Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's "The Empty Museum," 2004. Photograph: Hermann Feldhaus