Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary (2023)
Remarks on an increasingly salient retrospective
In times of war, culture is a particularly effective ideological weapon against one’s opponents; indeed, more than anything else, culture becomes a propaganda tool with which to harangue the enemy, (‘It is us who represent culture, humanism, and democratic values! Not those uncivilised brutes!’). It was with this in mind that I approached the most recent exhibition at Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary, an artistic and photographic retrospective dedicated to the eponymous Ukrainian photographer. What I found inside the exhibition, however, I can only describe as an innovative and welcome take on a country that finds itself in the most turbulent waters of its entire 32-year history.
Mikhailov, born in Kharkiv in 1938, spent the majority of his career as a photographer for the Soviet government, often inserting social and artistic commentary into his work. He fell afoul of the KGB in the 60s upon the discovery of nude photographs of his wife in his possession (considered a crime at that time in the USSR) and was subsequently dismissed from his post. Working as a freelance photographer in the 70s, he produced a series that would come to be known as Red (1968-75)—snapshots of daily life in the Ukrainian SSR: military parades, friends conversing, family reunions, all of which contain the colour red, representing the permeation of official communist ideology into the quotidian, the very social fabric of Ukrainian society, and that of the Soviet Union as a whole. Mikhailov further playfully critiques the official aesthetic of the Soviet state with pop art-inspired reproductions of military portraits and socialist realist propaganda in his series National Hero (1992) and Luriki (1971-85), highlighting the absurdism of Soviet propaganda output by reflecting its own unintentional kitsch.
Mikhailov—a government employee before his dissident turn—had no love for the Western-imposed economic regime of the nineties either. His work Case History (1997-98) documents the brutal consequences of ‘shock therapy’ market liberalisation on the people of the former Soviet Union, and the resulting explosion of homelessness, devastating poverty, and addiction. Of this Mikhailov says, ‘Life became more beautiful and active, outwardly (with a lot of foreign advertisements)—simply a shiny wrapper. But I was shocked by the big number of homeless (before, they had not been there). The rich and the homeless—the new classes of a new society—this was, as we had been taught, one of the features of capitalism.’ Throughout his work, and perhaps a product of his Soviet upbringing, Mikhailov never fails to emphasise that the everyday people of a society are the sinews that hold together its structure, and that community, whether facing authoritarianism or rampant individualism, is a reflection of that.
For those somewhat weary of the representation of Ukraine and its people in the present day, Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary is a refreshing and endearing look into the joys, hopes, fears, and trials of a nation still embroiled in a profoundly disruptive conflict. Indeed, the exhibition offers an enduring tribute to the humanity of the Ukrainian people and their culture that no vulgar, ethnonationalist slogans or warmongering propaganda ever could.
Finlay Darlington-Bell
Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary is running from 10 October 2023 until 28 January 2024 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.