boris mikhailov
parliament
10 May - 26 November 2017, 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Italy
30 September - 17 December 2018, Dallas Contemporary
co-curated by executive director peter doroshenko
The photographer, Boris Mikhailov, was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 1938. Mikhailov is one of the most important artists from the former Soviet Union, known for his social narratives and political images. Now based between Berlin and Kharkiv, Mikhailov has exhibited widely including the Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to name but a few, and this is his most recent body of work.
untitled (parliament series), 2017. c-print.
Dallas Contemporary was the second venue for this exhibition, co-curated with former assistant curator Lilia Kudelia, after premiering at the Ukrainian National Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Italy. The exhibition was co-organised by Dallas Contemporary and the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, Kyiv.
The works are digitally photographed images of European parliamentary debates from television, which the artist manipulated and fractured to be unrecognizable. The images are abstract, yet hold the figures intact. For Mikhailov, the history of painting, especially from the Renaissance period, hark in his works.
Viewing the full series of photographs in the gallery, the various politicians in the images stand out, but their messages and dialogues are missing and monotone at best. Individuality becomes less important and the label of politico becomes the focus.
Exhibited at the new art center, Studio Cannaregio in Venice, the Dallas Contemporary production signified the first time a United States based institution has organised a foreign pavilion at the Biennale.
untitled (parliament series), 2017. c-print.
Boris Mikhailov’s Parliament series is purposefully disorienting and the non-traditional installation was encouraged by the virtuoso of Eastern European photography.
The series is a commentary on the era of post-truth politics and the 24-hour news cycle. The deconstructed images represent the confusion and distrust felt in today’s political climate. The photographs were not framed to relay directness and a plasma television quality.
Boris Mikhailov was born in 1938, the same year television broadcasting began in the USSR. He devoted himself to photography around 1967, when his signature works emerged at the same time color television began broadcasting in Soviet Ukraine. The Parliament exhibition served as a larger code for understanding a paranoid state of society where media bias, radical power imbalances, and manipulation of information have become the norm.