Sergey Bratkov

photo Werner Demeyer

Ukrainian artist Sergey Bratkov is not only an enfant terrible of contemporary photography, he is also one of the most important contemporary artists from the former Soviet region, belonging to those who radically portray and document their rapidly changing society and its quest for identity. Bratkov grew up with the artistic resistance of the underground movements in Kharkiv, where the radical realism of the Vremia group inspired him to form the Fast Reaction group, together with Mikhailov and Solonski. While doing so, Bratkov developed a distinct style and attitude. His work is imbued with a slightly surrealistic kind of poetry, with great irony and humour. Nevertheless, it tackles highly complex issues about cultural transformation and the ideological treatment of images.

Viktor Misiano wrote a great comment on Bratkov’s work in his essay ‘The teenager Bratkov’ : ‘Bratkov belongs to the generation for whom the rhetoric of the “happy soviet childhood” appeared to be the statement of an indubitable fact. Yet his personal development led on the way of liberation from the ideological fiction.(...)
It’s essential for the understanding of Bratkov’s work that his childhood and a big part of his life took place in Kharkiv, a huge industrial town, where the hard reality clearly refutes the ideological idyll of the mighty. Probably therefore documentarism became the basis of work for the Kharkiv artists.(...) It was also in Kharkiv that Sergey Bratkov, who had started his artistic career as a painter, turned photographer. It is symptomatic that the first and till now unmatched, naturally autobiographic novel of Eduard Limonov, who has his roots in Kharkiv, is called “The Teenager Savenkov ”(in English: “Memoir of a Russian Punk”. Savenkov is the original family name of Limonov). (...)
In the post soviet nineties the ideological order changed into a society of show, and the propaganda clichés turned into media clichés. If formerly the sphere of human traumas and wishes was reduced to the absence of the mighty and the display of this sphere (…) had a disclosing and liberating character, the situation has changed today. The sphere of traumas and wishes is not any more only part of the world of the subjectivity but also of that of the commercial picture industry (…). Bratkov states the actual, new, post ideological meaning of subjectivity. While there had been obligatory rites for objective acts in the soviet era and an alternative world of subjectivity existed beside it, today the world of subjectivity and the world of cliché images become identical inside and outside. Subjectivity is an industrial product today.

To state this fact led Bratkov to the following conclusion: in the world of the total show and representation through play acting, not only the artwork is settled but even human existence itself (…). Bratkov, like his old friend and colleague Boris Mikhailov, becomes a personage in his own photographs (…). Bratkov (…) does not claim his nonparticipation in the general show. In art exhibitions he shows the very same photos he created for e.g. fashion agencies. Both constitute one territory of modern art – there does not exist a sphere of salvation any more like in the soviet period, and art is part of industry as everything else. In the result, Bratkov meets a double problem: the ethical one, to take part in the exploitation of (human beings), and the moral one, to exhibit documents of human humiliation (...).
The ethical blamelessness of Bratkov’s (...) works is apparently derived from their ethical relentlessness. They show that today it is more ethical to acknowledge one’s deep involvement into the amoral order of things than to pretend that distancing oneself is possible.’

Short Biography

Sergey Bratkov was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1960. He graduated from Repin Art College, in Kharkov in 1978 and five years later also as an electronical engineer at the Polytechnical Academy in the same town. In 1994 he organized the Fast Reaction Group with Boris Mikhailov, Sergei Solonski and Vita Mikhailov. Sergey Bratkov lives and works in Moscow since 2000. After being remarked with some important series like the one on the children in Kharkov around 1993, Sergey Bratkov’s work gained international recognition. He took part in group shows at a.o. Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden, 1999), Museum of Contemporary Art of Milwaukee (United States, 2000), the 25th Sao Paolo Bienal, (Brasil, 2002), the Venice Biennale (Italy, 2003 and 2007) and Manifesta (San Sebastian, Spain, 2004). He made institutional solo- shows at a.o SMAK (Ghent, Belgium, 2005), Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia, 2006), Baltic Centre for the Arts (Gateshead, Great-Britain, 2007) and Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2008).

In 2006 DEWEER gallery presented Sergey Bratkov's first one-man show, ‘Dream Rooms’. For the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev, in his native country Ukraine, the artist made a magnificent series of wide panoramic photographs imbued with love and illustrative for the state of things. The style and approach are typically Bratkov: a mix of intelligence, wit and irony, of anachronisms and absurdities. Bratkov comments: ‘I felt I had to make a monument in the shape of a book. I travelled through the entire country and selected 57 photographs.”

DEWEER gallery showed in 2010 a selection of 12 works from the series as a world-première. Bratkov made a room filling installation, adding the two videoworks ‘Mobilochka’ (2009) and ‘Egg-Plants’ (2009). Bratkov has always made videoworks and he likes it more and more to combine video and photography for several reasons. First, he uses the medium because interpreting both dynamic and static images at the same time makes the audience loose their sense of time. Second, a mix like that allows him to increase the emotional temperature of the show. And third, they allow to organise the space of the exhibition, like it is often done with sculptures.