The series of photographs was taken at the former estate of the landowner Litvarev (Sumy, Ukraine), where the writer Anton Chekhov lived with his family during the summer months of 1888–1889 and first conceived the idea for The Cherry Orchard. Behind the house was a fruit garden, which is partially preserved to this day. Series of 7 photographs. 15 × 20 cm

The artist created this installation near his grandmother’s summer house. He fastened her belongings to the concrete pillars, which serve as symbolic links between earth and heaven. Series of 5 photographs, 1986. Nos. 1–3: 50 × 50 cm; Nos. 4–5: 18 × 24 cm

In these pieces the artist moves freely between photo-collage, conceptual gesture, documentary observation, and poetic anthropology. What unites them is a persistent desire to strip away ideological veneers and expose the fragile, absurd, and deeply human layers beneath everyday Soviet life.

Bratkov’s portraits of the 1980s form a raw and incisive visual archive of a generation suspended between the collapse of Soviet ideological certainties and the emergence of a new, undefined reality. Created before the artist became widely associated with the Kharkiv photography school of the 1990s, these early works already reveal the hallmarks of his later practice: an acute psychological intensity, a quasi-anthropological attention to the human body, and an unapologeticall

A critical micro-narratives built from the most ordinary, often impoverished objects of everyday life. Each work isolates material fragments of late-Soviet existence and transforms them into visual statements about memory and the absurd logic of a collapsing ideological system. These images inhabit a space between documentation and metaphor, revealing the psychological and political charge.

The day of the Chernobyl catastrophe was the artist’s wedding day. As a reserve officer, he received a note from the local military administration instructing him to be prepared for departure to Chernobyl. At the time, he did not know the scale or seriousness of the disaster — everything was kept secret from the public. He posed for these farewell pictures with his brother, but in the end they forgot about him, and he remained at home. A kind of luck. 1986. Series of 3 photog

These photo-objects from the late 1980s treat the photograph as a material component rather than a purely visual image. Combined with industrial and domestic materials, the works emphasize weight, surface, and physical presence.

Collection of 25 black-and-white photographs, some hand-coloured, and a notebook. Early photographic work. 1992–1993. 21.5 × 239.5 cm

The series brings together two works: Ukraine  (1993) and the diptych With and without Braid  (1994). Traditional markers are displaced into industrial and private interiors. Through minimal staging, identity is presented as a reversible and contingent construct.