7. Ilja and Emilia Kabakov

5. Ilja and Emilia Kabakov, The Palace of Projects (1998/2001)

Since 2001, the walk-in installation in the salt store of the Zollverein coking plant has displayed 61 fictional projects that aim to improve people's lives in unusual ways.

With "The Palace of Projects", the artist couple Ilya and Emilia Kabakov created a "total installation": visitors move around in a collection of very different objects, showcases and sketches in a seven-metre-high pavilion that is shaped like a snail shell. They can look at individual models in several rooms, touch some of them and read the model descriptions, while time seems to stand still for a short moment.

The projects presented in "The Palace of Projects" play with utopian ideas in several ways: they are rich in imagination and remarkable concepts, regardless of how naïve or unrealisable they may seem at first glance. They turn the installation into a museum of dreams, inviting visitors on a journey into foreign worlds of thought and aiming to inspire their own creativity.

"The Palace of Projects" is on permanent loan from Stiftung Industriedenkmalpflege und Geschichtskultur.