Projected Visions - Bulgaria 
"High Sensitivity 10-Band World Receiver"

Curator : Krassimir Terziev

Artists: Katia Damianova, Petia Dimitrova, Leda Ekimova, Lazar Lyutakov, Orlin Nedelchev, Anton Terziev, Jelko Terziev, X-TENDO, Nikolay Zanev, Boriana Ventsislavova
 


Lazar Lyutakov
A Calf,  2005
 
Leda Ekimova
Alone, 2003
 
Jelko Terziev
Pooh Asked, 2002
5/5, 2005
 
Orlin Nedelchev
High Sensitivity 10-Band World Receiver, 2006
 
Anton Terziev/ Katia Damianova
How to Swallow the History, 2006
 
Petia Dimitrova
Nationality?, 2003
 
Association for City’s Research by the Means of Arts “X-TENDO”
There to Here, 2004
 
Katia Damianova
European Tongue, 2005
 
Nikolay Zanev
undercurrent, 2006
 
Boriana Ventsislavova
Fokus Pokus €uromatik, 2005

High Sensitivity 10-Band World Receiver


The video selection presents 10 artists of the youngest generation in Bulgarian contemporary art. To be honest in the initial research and collecting of the works it turned out to be difficult to look on Bulgarian contemporary art, and especially on younger generations as a package of national origin. The processes are much more complex and involve the interrupted history of the country, the migrations and globalisation. This is reflected in the fact that 3 of the 10 artists are not living in the country as well as in the language and aesthetics of the works.

The selected 11 videos vary in their form and genre from straight reportage and documentary format to short music video and more experimental sets. There is only a tiny red line that all works have in common – the artists share a sustained interest in reality, in facts and phenomena from the immediate surroundings or from the global media. With the exception of one title (5/5) all works are based in production, there is no sophisticated editing or image manipulation. Most of the works (except Alone and Calf) are narrative based. The subjects vary from internal introspection to portraits of individuals or sociological portraits of migrant communities, to further more complex studies of information flows and the construction of identity.

In order to briefly introduce the individual artists approaches, we can start with the two intimate works of Lazar Lyutakov and Leda Ekimova. In his work Lyutakov adopts a perspective that is radical in its simplicity and rejects any further rendering of reality beyond the mere recording of events. He puts his camera in front of a calf in a shabby yard of an Orthodox church and transforms that into a scene that magnifies the gaze. Leda Ekimova who introduces us with objects that, once being displaced out of the system of signs become vehicles of emotional auras.

Boriana Ventsislavova and Petia Dimitrova are busy with questions about the construction of migrant's identity and state systems of control and segregation. Petia documents in camera her own experienes of giving up her Bulgarian citizenship and application for Austrian one, revealing the reactions of other people and critical reflections on the determinations of nationality.

Boriana Ventsislavova & Miroslav Nicic follow for a year the workers at Prater area in Vienna, revealing “A roller coaster ride behind the scenes of the famous Amusement Park.” Most of the people working in the park, that originally is rooted in the early Modern and European colonialism, turn out to be coming from migratory backgrounds and explain in front of the camera the different paths that lead them from their places of origin to Prater.

Orlin Nedelchev portrays a person in his private room reacting in an imposing way to the radio broadcasts, zapping with his FM receiver. There are moments where this scene resembles a kind of shamanistic ritual of a personal body being obsessed by the spirits of the apparatus.

Jelko Terziev's both videos 5/5 and Pooh Asked maintain a very special studies on the ways information is disseminated in our highly medialised societies, and how meaning is constructed from the rapid circulation of messages. He is preoccupied with questions of the distance between the broadcaster message and the receiver and what kind of additional texts are being created in the transmission processes.

Anton Terziev and Katia Damianova, often working as a group “Ultrafuturo” (together with Boryana Dragoeva and Oleg Mavromati) are a rear example in the art-scene in Sofia of artists dealing with direct political action in public space or in front of a camera. Their performances mostly keep simple symbolic gestures and rituals that are easily recognised by the wide street “audience” and therefore provoke confrontation but also participation and involvement.

It might be said now at the end of the transition period the country has gone through in the last 17 years, that the rapidly-changing reality has offered much more inspiration for the artists than any formal experimentation with the medium or the aesthetics. In fact it is visible in most of the works that artists do not care so much about the originality of the form or the aesthetics. They borrow freely from languages of mean-stream media or leave the footage as it is being recorded. The focus is more on how meaning is constructed and what are the systems that mediate our perception and experience.


Krassimir Terziev
October 2007