Zhenya

The series The Kids (2000) presents five portraits: a boy seated on a stool wearing a women’s swimsuit; another boy sitting down, pouting; a little girl in a short black dress smoking a cigarette; a second girl in make-up wearing a dress that reveals her arms and shoulders; and another looking exhausted in fishnet stockings.

Sergey Bratkov’s photographs make the viewer feel uncomfortable. All five children in the series The Kids adopt poses that are inappropriate for their age: their clothes and accessories objectify and hypersexualise them, evoking child prostitution. These portraits are part of Bratkov’s wider body of work, immortalising lonely and isolated people in the post-Soviet world: (anti)heroes who live in a universe in a state of failure, and whose only chance of a new start lies in selling their body.

The artist’s photographs in the Pinault Collection were presented at the Palazzo Grassi at the "Le Monde vous appartient" (“The World Belongs to You”) exhibition (2011-2012).