A major new photography show pairing Wolfgang Tillmans and Boris Mikhailov is due to launch later today in Kharkiv, northeast Ukraine, in the midst of ongoing attacks on the city by Russia.
The exhibition, entitled Pairs Skating (25 April-28 September), is presented by the non-profit cultural organisation RIBBON International at the Yermilov Centre. Maria Isserlis, a curator and art historian based in Berlin and Dresden, and the Kyiv-based curator Tatiana Kochubinska, have curated the show.
“Through their lens, both artists capture the fragility, resilience and humour inherent in the human condition, the vulnerability of the body, and the notion of restriction—whether political, social, or personal,” says an exhibition statement.
Earlier this month, Russia intensified its attacks on Kharkiv, launching a missile strike which killed one person and injured dozens more. “The good thing is that [the venue] is a certified bunker so the public are allowed in,” says Isserlis.
“Wolfgang has supported Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. And Boris is from Kharkiv, so the exhibition makes sense,” she adds. “It's a completely new show; Wolfgang has never had an exhibition in Ukraine… there is a very careful dialogue between both of them, and us, where we selected works which would make sense in Kharkiv.”
Water and borders
Crucially, Mikhailov’s images of Crimea, dating from the 1990s, will be shown alongside Tillmans’s The State We’re In, 2015, an unframed print of the open water of the Atlantic Ocean. “We cannot avoid [political] topics. We're in Ukraine and the war is unfortunately still ongoing… so we decided to talk about [the war] through Crimea, water and borders,” says Isserlis.
“We decided that The State We’re In would be a very powerful statement from Wolfgang. And with Boris, we went into the archives and selected his series from Crimea, which has never been shown before,” she adds.
Mikhailov’s photos, some printed from negatives for the first time, show men and women sunbathing on Crimea's beaches, along with various seascapes. All of the works are original prints produced especially for the show in collaboration with both artists’ studios.
Boris Mikhailov, Berdyansk, Beach, 1981
© Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov and Barbara Weiss Galerie; courtesy of the YermilovCentre and RIBBON International
Mikhailov was born in 1938 in Kharkiv to a Ukrainian father and a Ukrainian-Jewish mother. He grew up in the years after the Holodomor, Stalin’s so-called “terror-famine”, which killed millions of Ukrainians. One of Mikhailov’s earliest memories is of leaving his father to take one of the last freight trains out of Kharkiv with his mother before German troops invaded in October 1941.
In 2022, he told The Art Newspaper: “They say a man can get used to anything. A house collapses and a new one is built in its place. But it is impossible to rebuild broken, destroyed lives. I cannot forgive this treacherous attack on my country [launched by Russia in February 2022]. I cannot get used to this war—the sight of poor people being torn apart.”
Other works on show by Mikhailov include Yesterday’s Sandwich (late 1960s-early 1970s), a series of photographs manipulated by hand that reflect the absurdity of Soviet rule in Ukraine. Case History (1997-1998) and Diary (1960s-ongoing) also feature.
Tillmans’s featured works include Tukan (2010), Nite Queen (2013), and Frank, in the shower (2015). The high-profile photographer was the first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize in 2000 and is also a Royal Academician (Royal Academy, London). In 2017, he founded the Between Bridges Foundation, an organisation that aims to support LGBTQ+ rights, the arts and democracy, and created posters for the anti-Brexit campaign in Britain in 2016.
Tillmans’s pivotal work from the 1990s include portraits of friends and cultural figures such as the model Kate Moss. Next month, he will take over the Bibliothèque publique d’information at the Centre Pompidou in Paris before it closes for a five-year renovation (Nothing could have prepared us, Everything could have prepared us, 13 June-22 September).
- Pairs Skating, Yermilov Centre, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 25 April-28 September
