Photographs from Ukraine

The ICA is committed to sharing artists’ perspectives on the world. These two photographs are in the museum’s permanent collection and were made in Ukraine by photographers Boris Mikhailov and Rineke Dijkstra. Both artists were featured in solo exhibitions at the ICA—Mikhailov in 2004 and Dijkstra in 2001. Mikhailov’s hometown of Kharkiv provided the backdrop to his series Case History, which documents people experiencing homelessness after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Dijkstra’s image taken in Odessa of a boy on the precipice of adolescence suggests the fragility of hope and the fleetingness of youth. Together, these searing images point to Ukraine as a place of beauty, deep history, trauma, and tragedy, both past and, with Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, in the present.

NOTE: Exhibition dates subject to change.