1-3. Images:

Boris Mikhailov
… In Search of a Window of Opportunity/Exodus …, 2020-2021
video still
Courtesy the Artist

4-7. Images:

Boris Mikhailov
Structures of Madness, or Why Shepherds Living in the Mountains Often Go Crazy, 2011-2012
Courtesy the Artist

Making use of both conceptual and documentary traditions and employing a range of photographic techniques, for over forty years, Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov has explored the resilient position of the individual within the mechanisms of public ideology, touching on subjects such as Ukraine under Soviet rule, the living conditions in post-communist Eastern Europe, and the fallen ideals facing the traumatic, war-torn present in Ukraine, drafting a multiple portrait of the human tragicomedy. His work is rooted in the historical context and incorporates deeply personal narratives and often humorous and surreal considerations. Mikhailov relentlessly turns the gaze of his camera onto the recesses of reality and its overcoming forces, featuring the body as a lens through which to investigate human history.“Which one came first: the chicken or the egg? A path dominated by fears or the terrors of a prehistoric cave?”
These are the questions opening Boris Mikhailov’s contribution to Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, gathering a new video collage, … In Search of a Window of Opportunity/Exodus… (2020–2021), and the photographic series Structures of Madness, or Why Shepherds Living in the Mountains Often Go Crazy (2011–2012). Created within a temporal space of a decade, both works focus on the human body: uncensored in its vulnerability and suffering as well as its capacity and need for recovery, profoundly bound to the traumatic changes characterizing its political and morphological surroundings. Structures of Madness, or Why Shepherds Living in the Mountains Often Go Crazy, juxtaposes photographs of rock formations with drawings presenting organic gestures that highlight bodily forms to be found in the natural environment. Referring to an old saying claiming that Swiss herdsmen often go mad, the series speculates on the possible reality of such a claim and its causes, finding these in the altered perceptions of the rocky mountainous environment and its drastic variations between day and night.
As Mikhailov wrote: “In the evening everything is transformed. Reality changes or simply vanishes, and phantoms of various kinds emerge from the darkness”. Mountains become, by night, petrified fragments of someone who lived long ago. Caves return being filled with archaic fears and terrors: is this the landscape of the human condition and its uncertainty, both in the universe and in our fractured historical existences? Playing with similar juxtaposition techniques also … In Search of a Window of Opportunity/Exodus… (screened for two weeks in the context of Mikhailov’s contribution to Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters) presents a layered nightmarish journey through the imagery of daily life and classic motifs, where the body is dissected, caricatured, violated and controlled but also playfully molded into alternative forms—from architecture to art and nature—revealing wounds, rashes, tattoos, and amputated growths of disenfranchised individuals and communities living on the margins of society and observing their entanglement with larger projects and entities. Not directly connected to the Pompeiian heritage, Boris Mikhailov’s images work as a palimpsest of similar, agential matters where nature and culture, past and present, documentary and imagination, joy and sorrow coexist in telling both personal and universal stories of collapse and recovery, ultimately celebrating the transformative, irrepressible value of life. CA-AV

Thanks to: Guido Costa, Guido Costa Projects, Torino

Home Page Image: Boris Mikhailov, … In Search of a Window of Opportunity/Exodus …, 2020-2021. Courtesy the Artist