Ukraine  is a photographic project by contemporary artist and photographer Sergey Bratkov that unfolds as a visual journey through his native country, offering a direct and at times absurdist portrait of a culture situated between tradition, Soviet legacy, and the accelerated influx of modern consumerism. Created using a panoramic camera, the series explores heterogeneous spaces - rural seaside resorts, urban industrial sites, monuments, and leisure parks - observing both lan

The artist’s elder brother, Yury, based in Kharkiv, has been a protagonist or collaborator in a number of video works. (Regina Gallery once featured them in the exhibition BratFest ; brat means “brother” in Russian.) 2009–2019. Series of around 20 videos. Durations variable. the opening of BRATFEST . City Municipal Gallery. Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2019

Bratkov’s second decade in Moscow saw a significant body of works in which images were juxtaposed with neon-light texts to create ambivalent tensions and mental ruptures. The first, produced in 2010, consisted of the neon slogan Long Live the Bad of Today for the Good of Tomorrow set against a panoramic image of a raucous social gathering — a Soviet propaganda slogan curiously reincarnated in the late Putin era. Yet the darker the decade became, the emptier Bratkov’s images a

Bratkov’s project Chapiteau Moscow marked a high point in his decade-long exploration of public forms of social life in the burgeoning Russian capital. The artist not only revisited many of his familiar social motifs, protagonists, and contexts, but also collided them through exquisite montage, seemingly in an effort to visually and semantically amplify the absurdity of social time and space. The prosperity of the late 2000s did not bring political stability or refinement but

In Hundred, Bratkov's brother appears sitting at a table on his birthday, where he begins to count, starting at 1. As the numbers get higher and higher on the way to reaching one hundred, a kind of despair is increasingly mixed into the brother's habitus. Is he struggling with the fact that he can no longer bear the years that are yet to come in their imminent suffering? Or is he perhaps despairing because he is counting down to the 100th anniversary of the day the USSR was f

The series examines various aspects of violence, fascism, repressive regimes, and the instruments and techniques of oppression. 2014. Series of 24 collages (C-print, drawing). 72 × 51 cm

Created in 2015, shortly before the death of the artist’s father, My Father  is a life-size photographic portrait. The work marks a shift from the artist’s earlier engagement with public and ideological imagery toward a radically intimate register. The father is depicted seated on a bed, surrounded by utilitarian objects associated with care, fragility, and physical dependence. The frontal composition and the absence of narrative framing establish an uncompromising proximity

The origins of the ‘Empire of Dreams’ project date from 1988, when Sergey Bratkov first sewed two quilt covers from the sheets of photo fabric manufactured at this period. They represented a collage of recurring scenes from his dreams. Both then and now Bratkov transforms the quilt cover into a kind of screen where fragments of dreams and memories are projected. But the new project is less subjective: here there is virtually no trace of manual labour and personal dreams are r

Our Lord. 2016. DVD. 3'12"