Boris Mikhailov – Viscidity | Autobiography as Performance, Absurdity, and Soviet Shadow

Description

Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv, Ukraine) is widely regarded as one of the most influential photographers to emerge from the former Soviet Union. Trained as an engineer, Mikhailov began photographing secretly in the 1960s, subverting the rigid aesthetic and ideological constraints of Soviet life through raw, often humorous or disturbing imagery. His work chronicles everyday life, vulnerability, and post-Soviet collapse, often using hand-coloring, montage, or diaristic text. Key series like Case History, Unfinished Dissertation, and Red document the disenfranchised, the absurd, and the brutally human — all while dismantling the myth of state-sanctioned utopia. Mikhailov’s photography has been exhibited globally, from MoMA to Documenta, and continues to challenge both aesthetic norms and political complacency.

Viscidity is Mikhailov’s pseudo-autobiographical statement-as-object, a book that reads like a bureaucratic fever dream. Published by PPP Editions, Viscidity is a substantial, beautifully produced artist’s book that blends bureaucratic language with deadpan, absurdist self-documentation — all housed in the publisher’s cardboard, clamshell case. Printed in bold red text over dark stock, Viscidity offers a deadpan summary of Mikhailov’s family, background, and political nonalignment — all delivered with ironic flatness that critiques both the personal and institutional ways identities are constructed. The book is as much performance as publication: part dossier, part anti-confession, part visual manifesto.

A rare and lesser-known piece that speaks volumes about his broader conceptual practice. Highly recommended.