I am not I

I Am Not I brings together 33 tritone images from Boris Mikhailov’s iconic series of self portraits that were made as the Soviet Union crumbled. Includes a text by Senior Tate Curator of Photography, Simon Baker.

“In describing the genesis of I Am Not I in the political context of the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet state, Mikhailov has suggested that he was performing a kind of anti-heroic riposte to the muscular confidence of Soviet-era monumental iconography.
I Am Not I, a thoroughly unacceptable series of propositions on masculinity, libido and the egoideal, is not only an artist’s performance for the camera, but a deliberately self-cancelling account of the impossible contradictions of authorship and identity.”
– Extract from text by Simon Baker