I see kalashnikovs, I see tanks I see dead bodies, I see burning and bombs, I see the face of evil, I see the face of you know who. None of that is covered up.
But a pair of breasts and a vagina has to be covered up because it is scary, when they see it everyone runs. God forbid they see a penis and they start running the other way.
Boris Mikhailov Ukrainian, born 1938
Untitled from the series Case History 1997-98
Chromogenic color print
Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill, 2013
Mikhailov's Case History series examines the social oppression and devastating poverty of a disenfranchised community in Kharkiv, Ukraine: those who had been left homeless by the rise of the capitalist oligarchy following the collapse of the Soviet Union. "The rich and the homeless-the new classes of a new society-this was, as we had been taught, one of the features of capitalism," Mikhailov observed. A haunting document of post Soviet urban conditions, the series captures the failed promise of capitalism with poetry and grit.