Boris Mikhailov

Hannover

Born in 1938 in the former Soviet Union in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Boris Mikhailov is seen as a chronicler of his native country, devoting comprehensive picture cycles to everyday life in Soviet and post-Soviet society. Mikhailov takes photographs wherever the social is visible in the private and the private in the social – on streets, at the beach, at dances.

The photographs become the underlying material for Mikhailov’s questionings of the polity and examinations of the conditions for human existence. In the process, his own biography serves as a point of reference: the act of photography and the balance of power concealed within it are reflected.

Boris Mikhailov attained pop status in the USSR of the late 1970s with works like the installation Yesterday’s ‚Sandwich / Superimpositions‘ (1968-1975), in which he projected two overlapping slides each, underlying them with music by Florian Merkel. The numerous overlappings of signs, colours and forms offer a nearly psychedelic sensory experience in which the intimate, the private and the public can no longer be separated from each other. During his current exhibition at Sprengel Museum Hannover, this slide is shown again after more than two decades.

Sprengel Museum Hannover

Febuary 24 – May 20, 2013
Kurt-Schwitters-Platz
30169 Hannover
Germany

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