By Lyle Rexer, February 10, 2025
It’s not so funny anymore.
Maybe it was never exactly funny. Tongue-in-cheek for sure.
Boris Mikhailov’s photographs from Ukraine, taken between 1986 and 1993, and his experimental slide shows and videos, exploited the ironies of Soviet and post-Soviet regimes in which the “promises” of both Communism and capitalism collided with the gloomy and alienated realities of life as really lived. People in Ukraine knew perfectly well that the party line and truth were two different things, even after the wall came down. But viewers in the west were able to indulge a kind of privileged comic schadenfreude, at the outrageously marginal characters, the troglodytic infrastructure, and low-level pleasures of people with bad hygiene. What some of us missed – and what is painfully obvious in this exhibition – is the poignancy and the profound sympathy of the images.
As a photographer and filmmaker with a conceptual bent, Mikhailov often used handwritten texts and sequences of images to pioneer a near-diaristic style that allowed him to play fast and loose with documentary expectations. For the exhibition which runs to February 22, Mikhailov has reconvened and restaged photographs from this period, printing a group in the giclee process, blue toned and large size, as well as a sequence in sepia, others in black and white, and another in accordion format. Also included are two videos, one from the 1960s-70s and another from 2024. The whole point seems to be that photographs simply do not exist as stable objects, and certainly not as indelible registers of memory: time changes everything. In their mordancy and the stark isolation of their human subjects, many of these pictures, especially those printed in blue from the early 1990s, all titled “At Dusk”, look like they could have been taken yesterday. Ukraine looks like a war zone, a place under extreme duress, where inhabitants endure, and hints of normalcy are the greatest luxury. It feels like perpetual winter. The photographs seem prophetic rather than nostalgic, the prophecy of hindsight. Refracted times, to say the least, as if Mikhailov had understood long ago that sooner or later Ukraine, God’s golf ball, would be facing the hardest winter of its history.
But not in the same way, as the Russian aggressors have discovered, in year four of a horrific conflict, to their grim surprise. All the photographs in this exhibition are worth studying and all are deeply moving, but it strikes now that the most revealing are the sequence that once seemed the most satirical. Mikhailov shot “Salt Lake”, presented here as both an accordion of small vintage prints and selected images printed larger, on a lake in southern Ukraine in 1986. It shows a crowd of bathers, many of substantial girth, cavorting themselves in the presence of industrial infrastructure, including most prominently a gigantic effluent pipe. This is not St. Tropez and Mikhailov is clearly amused by the Ukrainian iteration of the beach as an idea. But these people were not stupid; they were well aware of the pollution that was a legacy of the great leap forward that somehow never made it past mid stride. That black conduit seems to get bigger the longer you look at the photographs. But the obvious defilement of their health did not stop them from gathering and pursuing what they wanted and needed, including in the midst of the exhibition’s many photographs of isolation--the pleasure of being together.
It might have been a good idea for the Russian neo-imperialists to have considered these photographs carefully before they indulged the fantasy that the country they disdained shared their sense of who they were dealing with.
LYLE REXER is a writer, critic and educator who lives in Brooklyn. His novel, The Book of Crow, has just been published by Spuyten Duyvil.
BORIS MIKHAILOV, By the Ground, 1991. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
BORIS MIKHAILOV, At Dusk, 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
BORIS MIKHAILOV, Salt Lake, 1986. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
BORIS MIKHAILOV, Yesterday's Sandwich, Late 1960s – 1970s. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
BORIS MIKHAILOV, Installation view, “Refracted Time,” Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.