Bratkov’s video installation Vagina is My Motherland , filmed in the industrial city of Dnipro, represented Ukrainian contemporary art at the Venice Biennale in 2007. (Four years earlier, the artist had participated in the Russian Pavilion.) Metallurgy, a major Ukrainian export, was filmed as a kind of sexual act. The installation also included portraits of workers in light boxes. Installation view: Ukrainian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2007 2007. Mixed-media installation

The video shows military helmets crashing down from above like falling autumn leaves. Wars may seem distant, yet their signs and consequences linger in the air. Installation view: exhibition “Ukraine”, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, 2010. 2007. Video 2’30”

2008. Series of 7 photographs. C-print. Dimensions variable Installation view: Galería Espacio Mínimo, Madrid, Spain, 2008

In this absorbing series, the artist depicted ostensibly separate events — a religious cross procession in the provinces and an open-air rock festival — to suggest shared forms of collective spirituality. 2008. Series of 5 photographs. C-print. 103 × 280 cm

Arguably Bratkov’s most celebrated work, the video installation Balaklava Drive was filmed in one of the bays of Sevastopol in Crimea. Premiered at Regina Gallery in 2009, the work soon brought the artist Russia’s most prestigious contemporary art award – the Innovation Prize. On encountering the installation, the visitor first sees a large screen showing a group of young men enthusiastically diving into a water reservoir, possibly in an attempt to impress nearby girls, as th

The rather shocking photographic series Kualnik contributed to the sense of disturbing ambivalence that Bratkov sought to capture at the time. In a shabby, tiled room with rusted pipes, bodies lie wrapped in dirty blankets. What is in reality a popular salt-bay resort near Odessa equally resembles the aftermath of violent conflict, an improvised morgue, or a similar scene.

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

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

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

The video was filmed in the courtyard of the artist’s brother’s home during the war. It juxtaposes two visual registers: fragments of sky pierced by rocket fire and an apparently ordinary domestic scene where cats wander through a familiar yard. This everyday space carries the physical trace of violence — the scar left by a bomb that struck the courtyard. The animals, adorned with improvised festive decorations, introduce a naïve and almost absurd note that coexists with the

An object made from standard plastic road barriers suspended by two cables. Removed from their functional role of regulating movement and maintaining public order, the barriers are transformed into a suspended, non-operational structure. Shown within the context of the Kyiv Biennial, the work exposes the fragility and arbitrariness of imposed order, especially in conditions of war, where instruments of control remain visible even after losing their practical meaning. The obje