with Boris Mikhailov, artist, and Vita Mikhailov
and Maren Lübbke-Tidow, artistic director EMOP Berlin, curator

Boris Mikhailov (born 1938 in Kharkiv, lives in Berlin and Kharkiv), who became known to a wider public in the late 1990s, is one of the most important photographers of our time. His work is dedicated to the circumstances and point of view of individuals living within political systems: in the Soviet Union, in post-communist Eastern Europe, and in today’s Ukraine. In addition to the socio-political context, his stories also contain personal reflections on human vulnerability, desire, aging, and death, which he views with humour and a sense of mischief. 

We discuss Mikhailov’s early work Die Verantwortung der Landschaft (The Responsability of Landscape), which marks the artist’s important transition to a conceptual working method and his concept of the documentary image, which removes everything ‘unnecessary and superfluous’ in order to make room for the supposedly random, as can be seen in this series. The photographs themselves seem casual and non-descript: “But their imperfection, their trembling inaccuracy and endless boredom help me remember and convey the upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s.” 

We also present an exemplary work from the large complex Case History, created ten years after the end of the Soviet Union. It depicts the effects of the political and economic upheaval and captures the new social order and people’s reality in photographs.  

Language of the event: German and Russian (with simultaneous translation)