Boris Mikhailov — Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino (2000-2010) — Suzanne Tarasieve, Marais Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 14 → March 10, 2012

Boris Mikhailov
Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino, 2000-2010
14 January–10 March 2012
Opening Saturday 14 January 2012 at 6pm

Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve is delighted to announced the fourth exhibition by Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov, on show simultaneously at the Marais space (7 Rue Pastourelle) and at LOFT19.

Part of Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino was first presented in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, but this is the first time the whole series of 177 photographs made between 2000 and 2010 is being shown in France.

These photos follow on logically from three earlier series: By the Ground (1991), At Dusk en (1993) and Case History (1997), all of which explore the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR.

In Kharkov, the artist photographed the harsh reality of the street in the post-Soviet, in an age when “anything can be bought and sold, even children.” A new age was born, the age of business.

In the works shown here Mikhailov evokes the women who appeared on the streets pushing prams full of goods and crying “Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino.”
It was a genuine sign of the times: before, nobody drank cappuccinos.

The series begins with people sitting at tram stops, a great place for watching time go by. For many years, the tram was the means of transport for the modest and most vulnerable. The tramways disappeared, and so did those washed up by the Soviet regime. Kharkov got younger, became the theatre for the emergence of new social classes, of businessmen, of “ordinary people in a globalised system.” Cheap goods flooded the market, creating a bright plastic world for a new kind of everyday life.

Boris Mikhailov documents reality. Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino bears witness to this period. “I wanted to see if it was possible to show as many aspects of the period as I could, a bit like a history painting, but using the medium of documentary photography.” Boris & Vita Mikhailov — Kharkov, March 2010

Boris Mikhailov was born in 1938 in Kharkov, Ukraine. He lives and works in Berlin and Kharkov. His first retrospective is being held at the Berlinische Galerie this February. In 2011 his work was shown at the Palazzo Grassi during the Venice Biennale and he had solo shows at MoMA, New York, and Tate Modern, London — the latter continuing to 31 March 2012.