POST-COMMUNISM

BORIS MIKHAILOV, born in 1938 in Kharkov, Ukraine lives and works in the Ukraine and in Berlin. Case History documents Mikhailov’s perception of social disintegration ensuing from the break-up of the Soviet Union – both in terms of social structures and the resulting human condition. Case History documents the social oppression, the devastating poverty, the harshness and helplessness of everyday life for the homeless

“What happened on the ruins of the ex-Soviet Empire is still unique. Motivations are different. These guys’ shabbiness is the mirror of the ruin and disappointment of a much larger number of people, most of whom no longer feel safe and wealthy as in the Soviet era; many people’s ideals are gone forever, others have simply gone mad! I have taken pictures of them and I have enjoyed it, and maybe the whole world has a better understanding of the post-communist dramas through these sequences taken directly after nature.”
BORIS MIKHAILOV



“It is a disgraceful world, populated by some creatures that were once humans, but now these living beings are degraded, ghastly, appalling. This "fauna" is specific especially to the period of quasi-general diffidence, specific for most of the post-communist world.”
BORIS MIKHAILOV

EXILE

Nostalghia was a film by an exile: Tarkovsky in Italy, feeling his way through a new landscape, a new iconography and history. The love-hate relationship with the West, being surrounded by the West (a constant theme towards the end of his diaries, Time Within Time) translates into a film from the Russian-Italian border. The final shot, a three-minute long take, is an image of operatic incongruity: "the Russian house inside the Italian Cathedral." Maybe it is along this border that Nostalghia's Andrei, also a temporarily exiled Russian, walks with his candle. Does he walk on behalf of Tarkovsky?

RELIGION

Caviar-Icon, Alexander Kosolapov.







Mickey Mouse journeys through art history, Alexander Savich.