Rafał Milach: Refusal

In his 2009 project—a reportage from Ukraine entitled Black Sea of Concrete —the artist showed how the Black Sea’s coastal landscape had been transformed by human activity connected with the political situation, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new statehood. Two years later, in his next work, 7 Rooms, Rafał Milach presented fragments from the lives of seven people in their thirties living in Moscow, Krasnoyarsk and Yekaterinburg, thereby telling a story about people born in the Soviet Union but now living in Putin’s Russia. In The Winners, a project made between 2010 and 2013, the artist photographed the winners of various competitions organised by the authorities and drew attention to the propagandistic dimension of the Belarusian system of government.