Berlin, Boris Mikhailov -Time is out of Joint - The Eye of Photography Magazine

The Berlinische Galerie presents Time is out of Joint, a large retrospective of Boris Mikhailov’s work from the 1960s to today. This is the first Mikhailov exhibition of its size to be held in Germany, where the photographer has lived for more than ten years.

Boris Mikhailov’s body of work is remarkable for its diversity, not necessarily in terms of subject matter, but in the complexity of his approaches, at once conceptual and documentary. Since the 1960s, Mikhailov has produced a vast, multi-faceted oeuvre that is well represented by this exhibition.

With the goal of documenting men, society, the consequences of the Soviet regime and its fall, Mikhailov, born in 1938 in Kharkov, Ukraine, simultaneously embarked on an exploration of the photographic genre. “I choose to focus on ordinary, everyday scenes and the search for formal solutions to translate this mundaneness into photography,” he said.

Superimposing slides, writing directly onto the negative and coloring prints were some of the techniques that he developed and employed in his earliest works. In this exhibition organized by the Berlinische Galerie in cooperation with Boris and his wife, Vita Mikhailov, the selection of the work, the variety of formats, the quality of the prints and the layout of the exhibition all contribute to a global understanding of his photography, where poetry, brutality and irony coexist. It is as rich in form as in meaning.

A total of thirteen different series are featured in this exhibition. It begins with Superimpositions (1968 – 1975), his first work using the technique and an early testament to his audacious and innovative aesthetic. The juxtaposition of details, by turns beautiful, provocative, ambiguous disturbing, forces the spectator to consider and reconsider the image.

With Red, Mikhailov photographed Ukraine, playing with classic soviet symbols in public spaces. At official events like military parades or simple street scenes, the photographer emphasizes the color red. This ubiquitous color, drained of its symbolic power through ironic overexposure, becomes banal.

The series Viscidity was taken at the end of the 1970s, at a time when growing repression weighed on the daily lives of Ukrainians. Mikhailov shot the country’s deserted streets devoid of any sign of recreation. The black-and-white details, portraits of friends and self-portraits are either annotated with a half-prosodic, half-poetic text, or colored to inject the images with a new form of life.
In 1996, Mikhailov had the opportunity to spend a year working in Berlin. When he returned to his hometown, Kharkov, he took a series of portraits of the homeless showing the constant poverty, illness and worry of their lives. These shocking images are printed in large format for this exhibition and stuck directly onto the wall. Case History (1997 – 1999) is a testament to a fallen society that has produced totally abandoned individuals.

The exhibition ends with a work-in-progress: In The Street, streets photographs taken in Berlin during the last decade. It’s a documentary series on the urban landscape and its pedestrians, a working definition of modern Berlin and its inhabitants, a document of the passing of time.

A list of the series in the exhibition:
Superimpositions (1968-1975), Black Archive (1968-1979), Soz Art (1975-1986), Luriki (1971-1985), Crimean Snobbery (1982), Salt Lake (1986-1997), Red (1968-1975), Viscidity (1982), Case History (1997-1999), By the Ground (1991), At Dusk (1993), If I were a German… (1994), In the Street – Berlin (2000-2011).