Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War, the western world has been renegotiating its identity and the former Soviet Union started her long journey towards civilised economy – economy according to the sacrosanct order of late capitalism. For the last twenty years, trained engineer Sergey Bratkov has been dedicated to video art, performance and photography. In 1994 he joined the Fast Reaction Group (1993-1997) and what had started as witty self-empowerment in the face of an estrangement of the individual from the realm of politics turned into a dedication to critically document the social changes in East-European countries. Most of the results constitute series of photographs, each of which appears to have its own particular theme and aesthetics. Still, most of times, they do depict East-European social types whose fragmented identities transparent in compositions that play on allying visual -art historical- references and documentary style. Since a few years, these have come in the guise of a critique of mass culture and western cultural stereotypes. Hereby Sergey Bratkov simultaneously unveils East-Europeans ambiguous relation to their recent past, their desire for the capitalist Other and elaborate a critique of the prevailing order of this later.
