Igor Mukhin

Alternative culture of 80s

As part of the 10th Moscow International Biennale ‘Fashion and Style in Photography 2017’, MAMM showcases an exhibition by the outstanding contemporary photographer Igor Mukhin. Many of his images have now become iconic. While continuing to work on new projects, Mukhin is a teacher at the A. Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia, where he instructs a remarkable new generation of photographers who also feature in the Biennale.

Mukhin’s exhibition returns us to the onset of his creative career for one of the central themes in the Biennale, ‘The Wind of Time’. This project combines images from the alternative culture of the 1980s with the ‘Monuments’ series (1988), in which Mukhin focuses on the crumbling sculptures of Soviet monumental propaganda. Igor Mukhin depicts a vanishing epoch as it falls into ruin, but through the cracks we discern that something entirely new is developing. In this sense the photographer who has so precisely, vividly and directly recorded this transitional phase assumes a new capacity with the passing of time — he is actually investigating underlying mechanisms in the shift from one historical era to the next. All achieved by his own visual and photographic means.

Young, reckless and imbued with inner freedom, for us leaders of early Soviet rock such as Viktor Tsoi (Kino), Boris Grebenshchikov (Aquarium), Vyacheslav Butusov (Nautilus Pompilius), Zhanna Aguzarova (Bravo), Konstantin Kinchev (Alisa), Oleg Garkusha (AuktYon), Pyotr Mamonov (Zvuki-Mu) and Alexander Bashlachev will always remain as Mukhin saw and portrayed them. The future is unknown and unpredictable, but always has scouts that document events day-by-day, spontaneously and at first hand. Igor Mukhin was one of these scouts in the 1980s.

Temporal distance nonetheless changes the optics. Many luminaries of that epoch are no longer with us and many have changed with the changing times. Rock music of the 1980s is already subject to museification, while its leaders have acquired the monumental features of legendary heroes. Today the opposing elements of those years seem very close to us, yet equally distant. The wind of change so anticipated in the 1980s has risen in the air and intermingled the fragments of a passing era, the expectations and hopes for something better. But the memories, dreams and forebodings re-evoked when we look at these photos still remain. ‘It would seem that we [...] can feel free to forget this incoherent epos, with its endless details that never quite stack together,’ wrote the music critic Felix Sandalov of Mukhin’s photographs. ‘Yet we are compelled to return to the tapes of their songs, the reels of photographs, seeking the vague outline of we know not what, straining our eyes and listening intently in the search for our own identity.’