Sergei Borisov, b.1947

In the 1970s and 1980s Sergei Borisov started documenting the events of alternative-art life for the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANA) alongside Igor Makarevich, Georgy Kizevalter and Andrei Monastryrsky. In his works Borisov sought ‘to convey the texture of daily life in the time of the perestroika, with its incestuous relationship between the old and the new unfolding amid the ruins of the civitas solis. In each of these photographs, the sense of internal ruin is attained with a selection of run-down tourist-poster views of fountains, monuments, the Kremlin towers, or the Moscow River embankments as background’ (Sergei Borisov - Photographs, Moscow: Avant-garde, 1993).

Dialogue features members of the notorious rock band Dialogue. Founded by Kim Breidburg, the band was one of the first Soviet rock groups, combining in their music art-rock and sympho-rock styles and  playing to the lyrics by famous poets such as Arseny Tarkovsky, Evgeny Evtushneko, Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Mayakovsky. By the mid 1980s the band was already very popular in the USSR as well as abroad and this image was originally meant for a tour poster and was later used for their album cover.

A print of this work is held in the collections of the Kunsthaus Museum, Zurich and the museum of the Michigan Technological University.