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"

How long is now  is a series created by Sergey Bratkov in 2022–2023, following the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine and the artist’s forced relocation to Berlin. The works are based on photographs of everyday urban environments, over which Bratkov applies acrylic paint by hand, partially obscuring and damaging images of buildings, streets, and courtyards. Through this physical intervention, the experience of war is displaced into the context of a European city, addre

The series focuses on the figure of a woman within the context of war — not as a heroic image, but as its most vulnerable and exposed subject. Executed entirely in a black-and-white palette, the works employ a restrained chromatic range that functions as a filter of grief and mourning, stripping the images of narrative certainty and emotional comfort. Through painterly intervention, Bratkov partially obscures and transforms the photographic surface, disrupting visibility and

A long-term conceptual work developed between 1995 and 2022, structured as a visual and temporal self-record. Combining photographic images with illuminated text panels, the installation traces a personal history through quantified gestures, dates, and declarations related to smoking and attempts to quit. The work operates through seriality and repetition. Photographic images—fragmentary, bodily, and performative—are juxtaposed with light boxes displaying concise textual stat