Alexander Mikhalkovich, an artistic provocateur and “terrorist,” works in the genres of long-term photographic projects, documentaries, audiovisual installations and performances, using elements of psychodrama and psychological analysis.

The main themes of most of Mihalkovic's works are the past, memory and their connection with modern life. These are topics directly related to the study of time, the intersection of its layers and the representation of one time layer in another.

The Making the Internet Remember the Holocaust project explores the presence of the past in our current present. Mihalkovich carries out an act of psychoanalysis of collective consciousness: he confronts a memory-losing society with memories that it prefers to repress.

The author tests the viewer on the strength of the boundaries of his everyday life, as well as his concept of invulnerability, confronting the themes of death and consumption. By “taking over” the Internet, Mikhalkovich tells us: “I’m invading your world of sunsets, selfies, kittens and Instafood.” The author's intention forces us to explore the “dark” spots of our own consciousness, to peer into the history that lies under our feet, to project the present with an awareness of the experience of the past.

Anna Fox, a professor at the University of the Arts in Farnam (England), calls Mihalkovic a “cultural sniper” working with hidden history.

The chosen visual genre helps the author explore the possibilities of the photographic medium: photography is tested for its viability in the modern Internet space. The Internet, a thin surface, often distorted, resents the author's carefully planned interventions. The tectonic shift of the “cultural-geological” surface of the Latvian landscape and the surface of the Internet leads to a change in the photographic visual Internet layer. The landscape of the Internet is changing so much that our consciousness can no longer be different.

In the project “The Past Dies Today,” Mihalkovic projects the past onto the present. The author mounts various figures and situations from the past and projects them in historical spaces so that both the past and the present disappear. Dilapidated buildings become symbols of a conceivable past—inhabited by ghostly figures floating in space, transplanted from a distant world.

The past and present, colliding, are declared illegal and transformed - the author reminds us that our future becomes our present.

According to Paola Paleari (Yet magazine, Italy), Michalkovich's projects deal with monumental concepts such as history and politics, collective memory and personal consciousness, technology or tradition - areas in which it is so easy to lose orientation or not cope with their scale and depth.

Anna Shpakova,
Moscow 2016