JTF (just the facts): A selection of photographs and videos, variously framed and matted, and hung against white walls in a pair of gallery spaces and a darkened video room.
The following works are included in the show:
First Floor
- 1 video (color, silent), 2024, 8 minutes 28 seconds, in an edition of 5+2AP
- 1 slide show transferred to digital video (sound), late 1960s-1970s, 10 minutes 14 seconds, in an edition of 5+2AP
Second Floor
- 25 giclée prints, 1993, sized roughly 20×43 inches, in editions of 3+2AP
- 1 leporello of 46 gelatin silver prints, 1986, each print sized roughly 12×10 inches, unique
- 6 c-prints, 1986, sized roughly 22×33 inches, in editions of 7
- 20 gelatin silver print photomontages toned (as diptychs), 1991, each image sized roughly 8×12 inches, in editions of 7
- 1 c-print, 1995/2015, sized roughly 112×42 inches, in an edition of 3+1AP
(Installation shots below.)
Comments/Context: The Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov is an artist that I consistently wish had a bigger presence in the United States. While Mikhailov had a decently comprehensive retrospective at MEP in Paris in 2022 (here), it’s been more than a decade since his last gallery show in New York (in 2013, reviewed here), which itself came on the heels of a 2011 show at MoMA of his 1996-1997 “Case History” project. But every time I see his work in isolation, I hanker for a fuller and more in-depth chronological survey of his entire career, stretching across his Soviet and post-Soviet periods and connecting the themes in his work into a broader continuum of ideas. This gallery show is the best we’re likely to do any time soon in terms of a Mikhailov retrospective here in New York, although to call it that is a bit of a misnomer, as it’s really just a handful of projects spanning several different eras in his work, a jumping sampler that provides touch points for creating a sense of his most important subjects.
The show begins with a now-and-then pairing of videos, which provides bookends (of sorts) to Mikhailov’s photographic career. Mikhailov is now in his mid-80s and spending most of his time in Berlin because of the ongoing fighting in his home country, so his most recent work (“Our Time is Our Burden”, from 2024) features images primarily made outside of Ukraine. The video is a series of photographic diptychs made in the past few years, filled with snapshots, screen grabs, and other photographic observations, largely made in the streets, which have then been combined using formal echoes and other compositional or thematic resonances. The shooting consistently feels loose and improvisational, with various moods of anxiety, unease, and discomfort simmering through the images (including a few of the artist in the hospital.) While the edit could clearly be tighter, the video does capture an emotional sense of constantly thinking about a war that is taking place elsewhere.
This video alternates with a video slide show version of Mikhailov’s subversive project “Yesterday’s Sandwich” from the late 1960s and early 1970s (reviewed here, in book form in 2019). The source works that flip by one by one were made using sandwiched negatives, where two separate photographic images are superimposed atop one another in the darkroom. Against a soundtrack of Pink Floyd, the artist liberally mixes public and private, with the traumas of everyday Soviet life intermingled with nude provocations and caricatures of the military. At that particular political moment, such underground irreverence was the only way to rebel against the authorities, giving the works a contagious sense of free-spirited artistic (and personal) stubbornness. To my eye, these risk-taking dissent-filled image sandwiches remain some of Mikhailov’s strongest and most enduring artworks.
The rest of this show steps back from these two chronological extremes, settling into the roughly decade-long transitional period of 1985 to 1995 in the middle, when the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed (in 1991) and a new order began to emerge. Mikhailov’s “Salt Lake” project from 1986 sits squarely at the end of the Soviet era, when idealized images of Soviet life were still in the mainstream. His photographs (seen here as a double-sided leporello and as enlarged single prints) secretly depict bathers at Sloviansk, near Dontesk in Ukraine, taking a swim and enjoying the afternoon as though at a seaside resort. But the bathers aren’t at the beach; they’re swimming in the warm water at the outlet of a huge industrial pipe, whose “healing powers” were popular, but were likely heavily polluted with wastes from nearby factories. The dirty sepia-toned images are altogether surreal, with crowds of people (including many families) lounging near the massive pipes and lingering in the poisoned waters. Mikhailov’s photographs have an astonishingly grim kind of gallows humor, the calm socializing taking place against the obvious backdrop of industrial decay.
A few years later, in 1991, just as the USSR was really unravelling, Mikhailov made a series called “By the Ground” in his hometown of Kharkiv. Shot from hip height on the sidewalk, the panoramic photographs (printed an even deeper and more depressing brown than the “Salt Lake” images) document the wearying routines of everyday life. In contrast to the relative good times found by the lake, these images capture an urban fabric steeped in much less forced optimism – hunched women trudge along empty streets, shadowed shoppers carry limp bags, slumped figures sleep on the concrete, and canes and crutches decorate more battered pedestrians than usual. A few pictures play with literal (and metaphorical) walls, with figures leaping over, peeking behind, or peering between slats, all perhaps trying to catch a glimpse of the future; as for now, the prospects seem altogether dim, with plenty of literal waiting for the arrival of the new Ukraine.
Mikhailov returned to the streets a couple of years later, in 1993, for his series “At Dusk”, and his mood was even more bleak. While Ukraine was now independent, the economic situation had worsened markedly, which the artist represented via deep blue tints that reminded him of the deprivations of World War II. Here the panoramic images have been reprinted larger, making their ordinary desolations all the more enveloping and despairing. Dark figures wander the streets, wait for trains, stumble through the cold and snow, and gather in increasingly long lines, with anxious grimness etched on their faces.
Mikhailov provides a succinct summary of this decade long trajectory of collapse in the last image in the show (titled “The End of an Era”, from 1995) – a dignified building twists and shakes (via multiple exposures), seemingly coming apart as it disintegrates. As a visual metaphor for what was happening in Ukraine (and the larger Soviet Union during those years), this dissolving instability could hardly be more apt.
Given the ever-changing politcal circumstances in his home country, Mikhailov has been remarkably consistent (over many decades) in finding conceptual ways to incisively consider and document those situations. In both his Soviet and post-Soviet periods, as well as more recently with the ongoing war in Ukraine, Mikhailov has made photographs that thoughtfully wrestle with challenging social realities, using whatever methods and approaches were readily available, ranging all the way from bawdy humor to cheerless misery. But in all those years, his sense of active engagement has never waned, thereby cementing his place as one of the foundational Ukrainian artists of the past century.
Collector’s POV: The individual prints in this show are priced at €30000/€35000, €20000/€25000, €15000, or €75000, based on the project and the place in the edition. Mikhailov’s work has only been sporadically available at auction in recent years, with prices ranging between roughly $2000 and $30000. But given that the secondary markets haven’t included a representative sample of his work, gallery retail is likely still the best option for those collectors interested in following up.