THE HERBARIUM AS A PLACE FOR STORING IDEAS
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The Herbarium Project, curated by Irina Batkova, explores the working environment in contemporary culture where ideas are born and exchanged. The focus of Herbarium is to create a collection sealing, in 40 x 40 x 10 cm, or 20 x 40 x 10 cm boxes, the creative energy of different generations of artists from all over the world. The contents of each box, accompanied by a description and an audio file with the artist’s voice, will be presented both in the exhibition and on the project’s website. The artists invited by the curator of Herbarium choose two new participants—thus, the project tracks creative contacts in the world of art. The development of the collection has no time limits and grows exponentially with each new participant until the final exhibition is announced. [...]
Personal Utopias
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On March 13, 2020, a state of exception was stated in Bulgaria, as in many countries around the world, in connection with the declared pandemic of Covid 19 virus. The subsequent social isolation stopped not only the normal rhythm of life for every citizen from the affected countries, it rescheduled all over the world under completely new rules of conduct in the public arena unforseen for us all. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves in a situation of an unfamiliar form of government, which, according to Giorgio Agamben's definition, "is no one's land between public law and political fact, and between law and order." In his book Homo Sacer 2: The State of Exception Agamben explores this "temporary and extraordinary" measure of emergency management from the time of the Roman Empire to the present day [...]
Digital Aesthetics
In 1950, Alan Turing developed the concept of the child machine, which was an idea of embryonic artificial intelligence. He imagined it as a simple system that used learning as a means of self-development. Turing believed that instead of creating a program that simulates the brain of an adult, a program could be created that simulates the brain of a child and then, when properly trained, we can obtain a brain of an adult. Modern intelligent systems interact with one another, share data, learn and improve - the origin of this digital communication is human, but the rationale behind which such systems evolve, in many cases is unpredictable [...]
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The State Museum of Oriental Art presents: ‘The Bilge Collection’
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THE SHIP OF THE FOOLS
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H O T E L
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SIGNS OF SOUND
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WEEKDAY PSYCHEDELIA
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The most laconic description of the drawing as a process is to leave a trace with a tool selected by the artist on a material specified for the artistic intervention. The drawing is the shortest and quickest way to visualize ideas, and in this sense the spontaneous reaction leading to the appearance of lines on the drawing surface as well as the unintentional gesture are sealed directly into the final result. The American anthropologist, Ellen Dissanayake phrases art making as “the ability to shape and thereby exert some measure of control over the untidy material of everyday life". For Boryana Petkova, drawing is an act of rationalization of the world and not an artistic practice with a certain media. She documents the process of drawing from different points of view - the physical movement of the hand, the interaction with architecture and its surfaces, the sounds produced by the graphic and the derivatives of these sounds like music or computer modelled three-dimensional shapes, the specifics of observation in drawing, or briefly, Boryana analyses the line's ability to follow the movement of thought. In one of his studies, the British anthropologist, Tim Ingold presents the development of the notion of the line through Indian communication systems, through threads in the fabric and kipu, ancient ceramics, the Australian Aboriginal art, geographic maps, musical notation, the writing system and calligraphy, the schemes of relationships employed in scientific research and genealogy, etc. In conclusion, one of his findings is that "the fragmented postmodern line does not move progressively from one destination to another, but from one point of rupture to another. These points are not locations but dislocations, segments out of joint.” The hand that holds the pencil in Boryana's works does not just lay lines on the white surface, it explores territories, creates paths, makes sense of surfaces, leaves traces of work in confined spaces, traces describing emotional states, traces of immediate reactions to the physical environment, of the effort to overcome borders. [...]
In the Dissection of Memories Project, Kiril Cholakov explores the complex relationship between personal memory as part of collective memory and historical time. Through texts and images in pencil, charcoal and ink drawings (2014), and later in large-format canvases (2017), he tells stories from different periods of his life that have emerged spontaneously and randomly, depending on how the creative imagination has interacted with the images of the past. If the memories in these series are to be dated historically, they are from the age of state socialism (1944-1989), and the usual contemporary cultural reflection on that time is narratives criticizing the political system, irrespective of whether they concern cinema, literature or contemporary art. Nevertheless, for the generation that began their career development together with the democratic changes, the visual codes that Cholakov works with in these series, set a shared emotion for the time when our parents were young, our friends were full of energy and unconventional ideas for the future and the focus of being was not on solving the everyday life problems, but on the moulding of individualities with their unique scales of values. Very few of the memories in Kiril Cholakov's drawings and canvases can be directly attributed to the political content of the years of socialism. Those born at that time will recognize it in the interiors and exteriors, the vehicles, the depressing doom of the small communities, embodied in the disappearing silhouettes of the inhabitants of the village of Izvor and in the distant to the contemporary urban dynamics setting of Geo Milev district in Sofia. For Kiril Cholakov, these two places summarize the memory of Bulgaria and were foreseen as locations for the future exhibitions under the project. [...]
Alchemy is the name of chemistry before its scientific period - in the Middle Ages it developed as a peculiar science, based on the idea of the possibility of transformation of base metals into gold and silver. To achieve this sacred goal, alchemists introduced the notion of Philosopher's Stone. By this concept they designated a universal substance that turns base metals into gold and silver, is able to cure any disease and ng any disease even to ensure immortality. But true alchemists had used different symbols to describe processes of transformation within the person - in the psyche or soul, which also influence the physiological state of humans. According to Athanasius Kircher, alchemy contains the knowledge of the evolution of man from a state in which matter predominates to a spiritual state: the transformation of metals into gold is equal to the transformation of man into a pure spirit. [...]
A Theory of the present is a visual art project that presents art installations, video art, photo montages, photographs and digital art works, tackling the possibility of creating a universal temporal narrative spanning over the past, the present and the future. The works of Moira Ricci, Bill Viola, Kiril Cholakov, Ergin Cavusoglu, Dan Tenev, Krassimir Terziev, Bill Viola, Еrdal Inci, Valentin Stefanoff, Berkay Tuncay and Nina Kovacheva are displayed, where the idea of time is compacted to a degree of standstill, containing at the same time the energy of both movement and memory. It is in this moment of stillness that the audience can perceive the individual temporal parameters of the images, each of them consisting of their separate details which are the actual structure of the integrity of landscapes, family photos, stories about city architecture and daily life and the photographed or digitally created images. [...]
AKBANK CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS PRIZE EXHIBITION
The theme of Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize Exhibition 2016, "Future Passed" sets a wide scope for visual artists whose works took part in the selection for the exhibition and the awards. This exhibition reveals the contemporary artist as an explorer of a world whose dynamics is determined by social and political turbulence, a world where the future seems more and more unpredictable. The present imposes on us a constant revision of concepts we have been used to and which we haven’t called in question. Time is one such concept - it is part of the notion of stability and permanence of the values that give structure to our daily lives. We are surrounded by equipment that counts daily the passing seconds, minutes, hours the way we measure barometric pressure, temperature, the weight of objects, etc. But the uncertainty in the surrounding reality is relevant to the dynamics of discoveries in science that we perceive as objective, since time has a number of other characteristics in areas of knowledge that more or less can be defined as subjective. A new theory in quantum [...]
Unlimited 2011 - Award for contemporary Bulgarian art
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Redefining the space of everyday life
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TALKS:
The contemporary forms of visual arts reflect on our surrounding world and in many instances they do not rely on market realization. They are directed towards the creation of new communication strategies for the exchange of information with the audience and quite often provoke sharp public reactions by focusing the attention on various controversial political, social or ecological issues. Many artists, particularly at the present moment of global economic crisis, find it hard to survive on the market without compromising on their ideas. The Talks project affords an opportunity to actively working artists across the world to express freely their views and reflections regarding their work as contemporary conceptual artists. The project started with interviews of contemporary Bulgarian artists with the purpose of producing video-narratives revealing in their purest form the conceptions of the authors and their [...] |
