Michail Michailov — on the other side

Michail Michailov —
on the other side

Opening, March 7, 2023, 7 pm
Exhibition, March 8 – April 14, 2023

“Who am I, who are we, how do we relate to one another, and what is our existence about?” Michail Michailov explores these fundamental human questions in drawings, videos, and performances, and in the process stages his “self”, or rather its manifold variants, in installative settings that often refer to the respective exhibition space. The purview of his own identity ranges from the microcosm of dust settled in his artist’s studio to the landscape he navigates as a body. Michail Michailov’s artistic practice reads like a permanent attempt to reflect the large in the small and, conversely, to discover the small as a pattern of the large.

In recurring routines, he tests the architectures and urban infrastructures that surround him. The places he traverses often have something ruinous about them: storage sites behind buildings, abandoned places that bear witness to a human existence no longer there. Michailov wields found objects that he relates not only to himself but to the environment in which he encounters them by chance. How he moves the objects, responds to them with his body, is dictated by their form. The colors, materiality, patterns, and formal conditions of the natural or urban landscapes into which Michailov inscribes himself with ever new bodily configurations testify to the artist’s existence to the same degree as they make his body vanish. I am everywhere was the title of an exhibition by Michail Michailov. And indeed, he is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Michail Michailov (b. 1978 in Bulgaria) lives and works in Vienna and Paris.