The Russian artist Ilya Kabakov found international recognition in the late 1970s with his large-scale installations in various museums and at major exhibitions. In this book, for the first time, the courses given at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 1992/93 have been "condensed" into a comprehensive theory of the installation. In this text Kabakov develops the essential aspects of the installation: the questions of time, of context, of the connections between image and installation. The volume is published in a trilingual edition on Kabakov's request, in order to document his origins and the Russian elements of his artwork even in its written expression. Alongside this systematic discussion of the installation as an independent artistic medium the volume also contains a detailed index of Kabakov's installations since 1982, as well as a section of illustrations.