Boris Mikhailov’s series 'Cymepk? (At Dusk)' uses twilight to evoke a world undergoing transition and at the same time to refer to childhood memories. The series, which the artist also refers to as his 'blue series', was taken in 1993 in his home city of Kharkov in Ukraine. As with Mikhailov’s previous series 'On the Ground' (known as the 'brown series'), it records the city at a moment of transition following the collapse of the Soviet Union. With this body of work, Mikhailov proposes a new, monochrome visual language, with tilted horizons and apparently random subject/object positions, a language of “rupture, superimposition and alienation”, to deal with this new social reality. Although many of the scenes do appear to be taken at the end of the day – we see people heading for home in several images – the 'dusk' here functions primarily as a device to suck the images of light and colour . The images are tinted blue, both to make them appear 'old' and to refer to the 'blue hour' of twilight. The blue registers not as a colour, but as absence of colour (and especially, absence of Soviet red ), and by implication absence of Reason. Conceptually the dusk also refers to twilight of a particular type of society, suggesting a ‘requiem’ to the declining social order.

As Mikhailov suggests in the introduction to the book of this series, the blue of 'At Dusk' also refers to Ukraine's deprivation during World War Two during the artist’s childhood, when as a three year old he witnessed “the bombings, the howling sirens and the searchlights in the wonderful dark-blue sky. Blue, blue, light-blue…” As well as recording the post-Soviet moment, the ‘brown and blue series’ are also part of Mikhailov’s ongoing concern with the obliteration of Ukraine’s history, and in particular a total absence of photographic history from the Soviet period. Because these histories do not exist, Mikhailov suggests that they can be supplanted by the construction of one’s own history, “it turned out to be possible”, he has stated, “to play with history or substitute it. It was possible to take pictures of those very landscapes, and by doing so, to falsify history.” At Dusk is therefore a hybrid between a documentary and conceptual project, recording but also staging a time of abject poverty and social decay, of unemployment, fuel shortages, disease and lawlessness that might be both 1941 and 1993, or neither.