GLORY DAYS
JUNE 18 – AUGUST 29, 2010
HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
House of Photography in the Deichtorhallen, in collaboration with the Fotomuseum Winterthur, is devoting a major exhibition to the Russian-Ukrainian artist Sergey Bratkov (b.1960). It includes some 130 works and provides a deep insight into his photographic oeuvre since the early 1990s, which is socially critical and politically motivated, yet with a lyrical edge.
The wild, even lurid, photographs, picture cycles, and videos, verging at times on the limits of the truth and good taste, form the expressive core of his prodigious and extensive output. A direct, at times unsparing portrayal of everyday life and social coexistence since the collapse of the Soviet Union runs through his work like a red thread, occasionally evoking a strident theater of the new reality.
In his Bratkov, who grew up in the Ukrainian industrial city of Kharkov, lays bear in his picture cycles the obsolete ideological cliches of the Soviet era just as much as the newfound muscle-flexing capitalist drive of the east. His documentary portraits of steelworkers (Steelworkers, 2003), homeless children (Glue Sniffers, 2000) and women wanting to start a family (Princess, 1996) cite the hallmarks of nationalistic socialism by ostensibly classifying individuals in stereotypes.
However, what Sergey Bratkov seeks in his »portrayals of heroes « is not the conformity of the group, behind which the individual might be able to hide. Instead, his photographs launch a provocative jibe at post-Soviet society by deliberately flouting aesthetic and moral taboos. By heightening the scenes he observes with irony and subjectivity, Sergey Bratkov invents a new form of Social Realism in his photographs, unmasking critical socialism as fictitious and ideologically defunct.
