Entering Galleria Guida Costa’s diffusely lit gallery from their front reception room to see “Men’s Talk” feels like entering some kind of illicit and profane chapel. Whilst the space—which occupies an old print workshop a stone’s throw from Turin’s main railway station—bears distinct traces of its past, felt through its concrete floor and yellowing walls, its current exhibition invites contemplation on works of iconographic scale. The exhibition of Boris Mikhailov (b.1938) is the first in a series on the work of the Ukrainian photographer who came to prominence when he moved to East Germany from the Ukraine shortly after the collapse of Soviet Union. His social realist images portraying drunkenness and destitution both before and after the end of Soviet rule helped make him one of the most important Soviet photographers of his generation. “Men’s Talk” exemplifies the artist’s inquiry into what the he calls “the pure force of human being,” following the lives of a gay couple who were asked by Mikhailov to interact within the “set” of a prison cell in Ukraine over an evening. It’s left radically unclear, though, as to whether the couple are really incarcerated there, or merely inhabiting the space for the images themselves. The resulting …