Crossroad

Now, in retrospect, Bratkov’s work with the telling title Crossroad may be regarded as one of the earliest visionary premonitions in Russian art of things to come. It was also indicative of the artist’s novel methods and startling motifs, which increasingly came to dominate his aesthetic vision in the new decade. The twelve framed, red-tinted photographs — depicting typical sceneries and characters of “my Moscow” — are arranged in a montage-like manner to form the equivocal sculptural shape of a half-cross, half-swastika. The work was first publicly displayed in Neither War Nor Peace at Regina Gallery, Moscow, in 2011. “I don’t want to imply that we are in a state between war and peace; it is rather a state of neither here nor there,” the artist commented in the press release. “The collective unconscious sits very firmly in our heads. To this we must add that Russian consciousness is not historical but mythological: there are no boundaries between past and present. That is why it is so easy to push Russians into the space of myths. One can say that in Russia there is, and always has been, a state of neither war nor peace.”

Installation view: Regina Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2011

2009. Mixed-media installation. 300 × 238,5 cm