The exhibition Men’s Talk will open at 6.30 pm on Friday, October 10, 2014. It is the first part of a series of exhibitions and events dedicated to recent work by the Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov.
It is therefore with great pleasure and pride that we present this series of small black and white photographs in Turin. The Men’s Talk series was taken in Ukraine in 2011, and is a highly symbolic body of work with regard to the recent production of Mikhailov to the point that it can be considered a sort of distillation of certain aesthetic and political features that have always accompanied the great master’s art.

These forty-three, small format photos probe the ambiguity and thin dividing line that runs between reality and verisimilitude, between authorship and documentation. His deliberate use of modest techniques and simple settings provide us with wonderful examples of Mikhailov’s extremely private world and its essential ingredients: the human forms and faces he finds while on his constant search for humanity in suffering, paradox and misery.
Men’s Talk is an account of imprisonment, marginalization and loneliness - darkness, illuminated by flashes of painful seduction, maybe even a love story. In Case History, the protagonists are the latest “rejects”, cut off and frozen in a world of “others”, whether it a world of institutions or one of pure, anonymous misery without a past.
Once again, these are our neighbours, hidden away in the cracks between power and legality, for whom art alone can offer a temporary albeit slight redemption. Not by chance, the artist has removed any trace of elements that might thaw the sense of suspended time, place and identity from the frame, preferring to draw upon the tragic tones of pity. These figures are not the bodies of individuals and their stories: they are the body and history, the body of everyone and all the history of everyone.
This is precisely why Men’s Talk is an important work in its own right and not only in Boris Mikhailov’s long and distinguished artistic career.

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At 9 pm on Saturday, November 8, 2014, the second part of Men’s Talk by Boris Mikhailov opens, featuring a public presentation of an extraordinary new piece by the Ukrainian artist.

Alongside the forty-three black and white shots which make up the series Men’s Talk, taken by the artist in 2011, is a large self-portrait in the form of a triptych specially conceived for the exhibition.
Once again the protagonist here is the human body. Boris Mikhailov has chosen to bring it on stage uncensored so as to capture its painful fragility. No newcomer to self portraiture, the artist has explored its variations since his debut in the late 1960s. While the poetic and ironic content of his early small format experiments saw surreal and alienating reflections creep in at the edges, in 1992 the artists produced the large format series I Am Not I, printed on vinyl, where he staged subjects striking a hilarious sequence of different symbolic, classic and grotesque poses. The latter images caused such a scandal that Soviet police closed the exhibition on the opening day.
More than twenty years later, this large new triptych fits in nicely with the above, affording us a picture of a body grown old and sad in a pitiless reversal of tones and intentions. The bitter irony of the muscular body in I AM Not I is replaced by the mournful shamelessness of its twisted decay. Also the colours are affected by this unstoppable corruption, becoming dark and bluish like that of flesh during post-mortem. With this symbolic pose hovering somewhere between inside and outside, between present and future, the artist forces us to confront our destiny as finite beings. This precious and unique piece is a kind of memento mori. But it also epitomises perfectly Mikhailov’s artistic style: his gestures, his characteristic chromatic palette and mindset.
We are therefore extremely grateful to him for having given us the opportunity to exhibit this important triptych, a fitting conclusion to one of the most innovative and personal artistic trajectories in the entire history of recent photography.
The exhibition will remain open to the public until the end of January 2015.

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Boris Mikhailov (Kharkov, Ukraine, 1938) is one of the most important photographers working today, who has left an indelible mark on contemporary photography with a number of innovative series, both aesthetically and thematically. His unmistakeable photographic style, both crude and poetic, has won many prestigious awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation International Award, 2000. He has exhibited in one-man shows at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998), the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2004), Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2007), National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2008), MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011) and Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2012). His work can be found in the most important public and private collections around the world. Part of his series Structures of Madness, or Why Shepherds Living in the Mountains often Go Crazy (2011-12) can be seen in the exhibition Intenzione manifesta. Il disegno in tutte le sue forme at the Castello di Rivoli. Men’s Talk is the fruit of a twenty-year relationship with the gallery and the artist’s fourth one-man show in Turin.