Mykola Trokh. Pornographic Series

Specially to the release of the ‘Mykola Trokh. Enfant Terrible of Ukrainian Photography ‘ the author Valery Sakharuk jointly with our foundation puts on view the project ‘Pornographic Series of Mykola Trokh’. The exhibition presents the reconstruction of the triptych ‘Pornography as a mirror of our life’ 1995 and the significant photo series of the nineties – ‘Schoolgirls’, ‘XYZ’, ‘Sadomazo’. In these photographs is revealed the theme of taboo in Ukrainian art. As Valery Sakharuk writes in his book: “Discussion on defining the boundary where art ends and pornography begins flared up against the ban on the posthumous exhibition of the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It immediately touched the category of freedom, as the fundamental privilege of the artist. Censorship did not go around Andy Warhol’s ‘Interview’ cover featuring Madonna – the controversial fragment of the photograph was sealed with a red rectangle. A peculiar response to these events was the words of Lucy Lippard, published in 1990 in the December issue of ‘Art in America’: “The best art is being created today by people who resist a system”. Two years earlier, the American artist Richard Prince compared life in the United States with sex, writing: “Sex. Lots of sex. Everything is like sex. Everything sounds like sex”. With his ‘Pornographic cycle’ Nikolay Trokh diagnosed Ukrainian society – how acute the course of this disease will be, he later became convinced from his own experience”.