Animal inside 41

Tatiana Mikhina is a Russian photographer and independent visual artist based in Barcelona. She began her career in Moscow working in staged and fine art photography before developing her own personal projects. “What has always fascinated me is photography’s ability to make even the most illusory image seem believable,” she says, “precisely because it remains rooted in the capture of a real moment.”
Ballet dancers, contemporary dancers, actors, and performance artists: she works alongside professional performers, including soloists from the Bolshoi, the Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater in Moscow, and the Kremlin Ballet. In them, she finds a rare bodily awareness—one capable of conveying an inner state through movement alone—which has had a lasting influence on her own photographic language. “I’m interested in the human body, in movement, in the very nature of movement,” she says, “and I constantly turn to artists from different eras to observe how they construct composition, light, and rhythm. ”
From this fascination emerge series exploring physicality, inner freedom, vulnerability, memory, and transformation, in which long exposures and grain lend the images a suspended quality, never quite frozen in time. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and America, where several of her series have won awards.
With “Animal Inside,” she draws a parallel between the grace, strength, and instinct of the horse and the same sense of freedom—patiently cultivated—in the ballet dancer, a series she is exhibiting as a solo artist in Moscow. Now based in Barcelona, she continues this work in a new cultural context. Her motto: “Where things get complicated, that’s where the most interesting part begins.”