After joining forces on the exhibition Home Again by Mari Katayama, shown at KYOTOGRAPHIE in 2020 and in Paris the following year, on the group show Women Artists from the MEP Studio presented in the spring of 2021, and Irving Penn: Works 1939-2007. Masterpieces from the MEP Collection presented in the spring of 2022, the MEP is proud to once again collaborate with the KYOTOGRAPHIE International Photography Festival to present Boris Mikhailov’s slideshow Yesterday’s Sandwich, following the major retrospective of Mikhailov’s work organised by the MEP in 2022.
Born in 1938 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Boris Mikhailov, whose pioneering practice encompasses documentary photography, conceptual work, painting and performance, is one of the greatest photographic artists of his generation. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a haunting record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequences of its dissolution.
Yesterday’s Sandwich was conceived at the beginning of the artist’s career in the late 1960s and 1970s, after Mikhailov accidentally superimposed two slides from a series of images forbidden by the communist regime. Fascinated by the result, he created dozens of accidental combinations, which he presented in the form of a poetic installation juxtaposing scenes of urban landscapes, military parades and female nudes, evoking the influence of the totalitarian regime on everyday Soviet life.
This celebration of Boris Mikhailov’s oeuvre, taking place against the backdrop of a brutal war in Ukraine that few thought possible in the twenty-first century, is especially poignant in light of the fact that Boris and Vita Mikhailov’s native Kharkiv has been devastated by this conflict; their emotional and political relationship to their subject has been permanently and irrevocably altered. Given these tragic circumstances, we are especially proud to honor his work at a moment when there is a clear need to support the Ukrainian people and its threatened cultural sector both at home and abroad. Yesterday’s Sandwich is thus a celebration the lives of people who continue to show the meaning of survival and triumph over adversity, as seen through the eyes of one of their most sensitive and original witnesses.
Born in 1938 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. For more than half a century, he has been bearing witness to the grip of the Soviet system on his country, constructing a powerful photographic narrative that in the light of current events, is all the more enlightening. Trained as an engineer, Mikhailov was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he was employed. He also used it to take nude photographs of his wife, and was fired after these were discovered by KGB agents. He then decided to take up photography full-time in reaction against the idealized, propaganda images that permeated Soviet life, constructing his own distinct artistic language in an extraordinarily rich body of work that defies categorization. Mikhailov and his wife Vita divide their time between Berlin and Kharkiv. In 2022, a major retrospective of his work was organized at the MEP (Maison européenne de la photographie) in Paris.
