Kids

Produced in 2000, Kids is a photographic series composed of individual life-sized or near life-sized portraits depicting children and adolescents photographed in post-Soviet urban environments. The series presents six portraits: a boy seated on a stool wearing a women’s swimsuit; another boy sitting down, pouting; a little girl in a short black dress smoking a cigarette; a second girl in make-up wearing a dress that reveals her arms and shoulders; and another looking exhausted in fishnet stockings.

Sergey Bratkov’s photographs make the viewer feel uncomfortable. All five children in the series The Kids adopt poses that are inappropriate for their age: their clothes and accessories objectify and hypersexualise them, evoking child prostitution. These portraits are part of Bratkov’s wider body of work, immortalising lonely and isolated people in the post-Soviet world.

Kids occupies a crucial place within Bratkov’s early practice and his international emergence at the turn of the 2000s.

Works from the series Kids (2000) are held in the following public and institutional collections:

Pinault Collection, Paris / Venice

M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (Collection of the Flemish Community), Antwerp

Selected Exhibitions

– Kids, Regina Gallery, Moscow, 2000

– Djeti – Kinder – Kids, Kunstverein Rosenheim, Rosenheim, 2001–2002

– Kids, Espacio Mínimo, Madrid, 2003

2000. Vera, Sasha, Zhenya, Lena, Zakhar, Sonechka, Polia.

C-print. 40 × 27 cm