From Friday morning, the East Wing of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, now the Irish Museum of Modern Art, will be a hospital again - (though, of course, the army pensioners' home was never a hospital in the traditional sense). The Russian installation artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have overseen the recreation of eight wards and a corridor, complete with iron bedsteads, a nurse's station and institutional green and cream walls. Light curtains screen each room from the next. They have called the work The Children's Hospital.

Their hospital has a number of unorthodox features. There are no patients, for one thing. Instead, the Kabakovs' intention is that visitors who sit on the bedside chairs or on the beds will become patients by proxy. Next to each bed there is a mechanical model theatre. A different, simple tableau is performed in each miniature theatre, complete with music and narration. "Perhaps," the Kabakovs write in their outline of the installation, "these shows were created by the head doctor in order to make the children's time there a little bit nicer and easier, to distract them from their illness."

This premise, laid out in an explanatory textual display, is the first thing you encounter when you enter the corridor. All of the music is gentle and soothing. The stories relayed by the narrator are curiously vague and inconclusive. In one tableau, two figures survey a jumble of upturned tables and chairs and other domestic chaos. The narrator tells us that Repulsive George and His Friend Coco, as they are called, sneak into their neighbours' house whenever they go out and inflict progressively worse damage each time. What can the neighbours do? No firm solutions are offered. Perhaps the viewer will suggest some. For the stories are, in a sense, bait designed to capture the viewer's imagination. Stories and setting are, the Kabakovs say, designed to put us, the viewers, in the position of the patient. They want to break down the detachment that conventionally exists between viewer and artwork.

"We do this with all of our installations," Ilya explains. "The theatrical setting may look like the main ingredient, but all of this detail is necessary to create a certain atmosphere, a private space where the viewer ceases to be just a viewer, forgets about the museum, and can have personal contact with the ideas." More or less everybody, they reckon, has had some experience of a children's hospital, either personally or through someone close to them. Emilia herself has vivid memories of such an experience. "I had health problems when I was young that resulted in my spending one year in hospital. It is difficult for a child to be in that situation, separated from your family, confined in the same place. There was no television at that time. I coped by reading a lot, and in the evening I would tell stories to the other children."

They estimate it will take a visitor about half an hour to work their way through each room. By that time, perhaps sooner, they hope that the formality of the visitor-museum relationship will have evaporated, and people will have been lulled or provoked into reflecting on their own experiences. "It's difficult to achieve this goal in installation," Ilya points out. "We would like, when someone leaves, that they don't think: I've seen an installation made by these artists. We hope that they are remembering things from their own lives, that we have encouraged them to do that."

There is a therapeutic element to this vision that is not incidental. The Children's Hospital is actually the fifth in a series of works which have healing as a central idea. Healing with Paintings is another in the series. This involved the invention of another enlightened doctor, "Professor I.D. Lunkov", with a theory about the therapeutic effect of exposure to paintings. The Kabakovs were amused and delighted to discover consideration given to this idea in a reputable medical journal, with references to "the Professor" included. The Professor, and the notional head doctor who may have dreamed up the model theatres, is typical of the work of Ilya Kabakov. He consistently devises fictional characters. In the early 1970s he made a series of albums which amounted to artistic biographies of a number of invented artists, exhaustively detailing and often illustrating their works and concerns. They all had one thing in common. They existed, unrecognised, at the margins of officialdom, not unlike Kabakov himself at the time.

He was born in the Ukraine in 1933. Or rather, he insists, he wasn't born in the Ukraine, but in the USSR, a political entity which no longer exists. It is an important point because it relates to his views on the transience of all institutions, including museums. One of his installations consisted of a provincial Soviet museum dedicated to a fictional Soviet artist. This crumbling, dilapidated place was itself built within a museum which, it was implied, would in turn crumble. Educated within the efficient but highly structured, bureaucratic art school system, he went on to make a living as an illustrator of children's books, a job that enabled him to do his own work in his own time. There were restrictions, however. From an early age he was acutely conscious of living simultaneously on an official and an unofficial level. For some 30 years, in addition to his official, public existence, he was an underground artist, a central figure in a vibrant, thriving alternative artistic community in Moscow.

He has described what a strange situation it was. On the one hand, his fellow artists were extremely supportive, while on the other, they all worked in a vacuum, in isolation, without contact with a real audience and the world beyond the confines of their immediate circle. In response to this, he started to work in relation to an imagined, even idealised international art community. When his work was first exhibited abroad, in 1965, at the invitation of a member of the Italian communist party, he was more or less black-listed at home and lost his job as an illustrator. But he remained in Moscow until 1986 when he accepted an invitation to work in Salzburg. As he explains, it wasn't a question of not returning home, but more that he has been accepting invitations to work in various parts of the globe ever since.

The nearest place to home now is New York, where he is based with Emilia, with whom he has collaborated since 1990, and who left the USSR some 26 years ago. Neither of them has been back to Russia since they left. For a number of reasons, he says: "No one reason. It's like a mixed salad. No one ingredient is the essence of the salad. And it's a mixed salad of reasons." He smiles when he says this. Neither of them conform to the stereotype of the Russian emigre, nostalgic for his homeland.

While on the face of it, his experiences in Russia are central to many of the installations he has made in the West, including imaginative evocations of communal apartments, for example, he is at pains to point out that he is engaged neither on a biographical project nor a critique of the Soviet system. He uses those experiences because every artist must use what is familiar. But it's never about Russia as such: "Every artist lives in a fantasy world," he says more than once. And the Russian elements are diminishing in any case, he feels. "As time goes by, the works more and more belong to the space in which they are made. Wherever we are asked to work, the site enters increasingly into the work, as it does here." It is still tempting, though, to see the precise, atmospheric play on memory in The Children's Hospital, and its characteristic focus on the problematic relationship of the individual to the institution, as being simultaneously universal and very personal. It is clear, as well, from the way they launch into animated discussion in Russian when the subject comes up, that it is a thorny issue and, almost as an afterthought, Ilya acknowledges this: "You must understand," he says with a wry smile, "that Russia is a complicated country and inevitably you have a very complicated relationship with it."

The Children's Hospital by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, can be seen at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until April 11th, 1999