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Sergey Bratkov is a photographer who was active in the Fast Reaction Group, an urban interventionist collective prominent in Ukraine during the mid-1990s (together with Boris Mikhailov, Sergey Solonsky, and Victoria Mikhailova).
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Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt
Sergey Bratkov is a photographer who was active in the Fast Reaction Group, an urban interventionist collective prominent in Ukraine during the mid-1990s (together with Boris Mikhailov, Sergey Solonsky, and Victoria Mikhailova). His work arrives out of a consciousness of his own time gauged against the political, social, and economic contingencies of the “just past.” Bratkov seeks out young subjects who find themselves listless within a liminal space inscribed by the temporal gap between Ukraine’s Soviet period and its subsequent reincarnation as an evolving market economy and political anomaly. In Koldo Mitxelena, the artist remixes images that approach the child as a subject beyond common juvenile clichés. Bratkov’s children come from a generation “in between” that still hold a residual infantile consciousness of the immediately prior while prematurely entering an adolescence located in an antithetical elsewhere. These kids, forever parentless and invulnerable, are consumed by an alienating experience of youth that is still often reduced to exchange value by the increasing international demand for adoption and abundant sex trafficking.
“In the winter of 1996, my financial situation was so disastrous that I had to rent out my two-room flat, and stayed in the studios of various friends. I had no idea that my flat was not far from an orphanage hidden in the private housing sector across the street. My first tenants were Americans who came to Kharkiv to find children to adopt into their families. The adoption procedure took two weeks. The future parents and children were expected to become acquainted at the orphanage. So the foreigners stuffed their bags with food and clothes they had bought beforehand in the U.S. for the children, and went to the orphanage every morning. When they returned at the end of the day, they promptly locked the iron-rimmed door of my flat, and did not go out until the next morning. Two weeks later, the temperature dropped below -15ºC. I needed to go back to my apartment for my fur cap. I called my flat. At that time, my tenant Clare had already chosen a child for herself, a fair-haired boy with traces of Mongolian heritage apparent in his face. Clare was worried: did the boy resemble her husband? I offered to take a photo of the boy and send it back home to enable John to prepare himself morally for the encounter with his new family. Clare was overjoyed and agreed that I should photograph the boy. The following day, I went to take the photographs. Electricity was switched off in our town for reasons of economy that winter. Everything sank into darkness. In the moonlight, the house of the orphanage looked like grim barracks. It was dark inside the house, too. A few candles were burning on windowsills along the corridor. Two women were washing children in the bathroom. Candles in empty cans were tied to water taps with bandage gauze. The child I was looking for was in the second-floor dormitory. I stepped into the room with a candle in my hand. I could make out the outlines of about two dozen beds in the moonlight pouring through the windows. Suddenly hundreds of ghosts attacked me. They were children with bed sheets over their heads, and all of them were shouting, ‘DADDY!!!’ These were my first children, and the beginning of my long journey of children photography.”
—Sergey Bratkov, May 2004
