Von Antje Mayer.
Von Antje Mayer.
Krassimir Terziev
Krassimir Terziev (*1969) works mainly with new media. He is not only a co-founder of the »Interspace – New Media Art Center«, but since 2004, also a Co-Director of Xfilm Festival for Experimental Film, Video & New Media in Sofia. Terziev’s artistic theme is film, with the mechanisms of the global film industry that stand behind it, which exert huge social influence not only with their financial power but also with their omnipresence in everyday life, according to Terziev especially in societies undergoing transformation, like that of Bulgaria. He is a painstaking researcher into Bulgarian everyday (media) life, first subjecting it to a systematic analysis and then introducing the results into a poetic-cynical filmic form; out of this come his »meta-film-works«. For the Hollywood Production Troy with Brad Pitt, 5,000 Bulgarian sport students were cast to play Greek warriors, and in the end 300 of them were flown to the Mexican desert for shooting. But there they were employed at dumping-rates under questionable labour-law conditions, which ultimately even led to an uprising among the extras. For his big video documentation Battles of Troy (2004) he uncovered the huge global machinery behind this film production. He interviewed the »chosen people«, who talk about their dreams of a great career in Hollywood and of what they really experienced. The parallel to cheap Bulgarian labour in the textile industry, who sew elegant brand-name clothes for rich industrial countries under the most objectionable conditions, is made plain. One of Terziev’s best-known works internationally is the film collage BG Track (2002). In the video, he sets scenes from famous Hollywood films into sequences, where stereotypes of Bulgarians as dark villains, hairy sex maniacs or yoghurt inventors are focused on. In the film classic Casablanca, for example, a young Romanian woman begs Humphrey Bogart to help her get to the Holy Land of the USA. There is a parallel to the exodus of many young Bulgarians, which is becoming more and more problematic. But Bogart pushes the idea of staying at home: Go back to Bulgaria! Terziev loops this speech at the end of his film like challenging wink to all exile Bulgarians: Go back to Bulgaria! Go back to Bulgaria! Go back to Bulgaria!
Pravdoliub Ivanov
Another researcher into everyday life is Pravdoliub Ivanov (*1964), who teaches at the Academy of Visual Arts in Sofia and who is exhibiting this year at the Venice Biennale, in Bulgaria’s first separate pavilion, in the Europe Office of UNESCO. His works, for which he uses a wide range of objets trouvés, make their point clearly, almost like slogans, at the first glance, but then lead the viewer further into complex levels of meaning. For the Bulgarian curator, Maria Vassileva, it is practically »a gift«, the way Ivanov, casually yet precisely, is able to give everyday things a fully new, poetic, sometimes amusingly metaphorical but always extremely complex context.
His work Easy Banners (1997), flags with transparent foil and without emblems or captions, is a pastiche of the fundamentally interchangeable representative gestures of power and politics, which he experienced not only under Communism but also in the constant change of political colours after the collapse of Communism. The work So many reasons (2004) can be understood as a reference to the need for improvisation, caused by the Communist system, which often brought about hair-raising spontaneous constructions. A table is standing in front of a door. Instead of moving it away, to open the door, a piece is cut out of the door. For the installation Transformation Always Takes Time and Energy (2000), which is often shown outside Bulgaria and which refers to the process of transformation in Bulgarian society, Ivanov borrowed thirty pots from friends and relatives, filled them with water and put them on an electric stove, which, however, only heated the water to a point where it gave off steam but never actually boiled.
Alla Georgieva
Alla Georgieva (*1961) bases her work in formal terms on advertising or fashion photography, which she combines with traditional Bulgarian »codes«, such as national dress or folk music. Often, too, she makes »handicraft works«, which deal with the new reality of what Georgieva calls the »obscene world of goods«. Recent examples are her cake-works from 2004 – colourful cakes which she decorates with seemingly cute figures. Looked at more closely, however, what is presented turns out to be a rape scene or a brutal act of violence. Alla Georgieva’s work has a biographical background, since she knows Communist society and the neo-Capitalist one equally well. One of her recent works, Bulgarian Souvenirs (2005), was to be seen on advertising screens spread all over the city. In a comic strip, two dolls wearing traditional folk aprons dance to the melody of an old Bulgarian folk song. Then, from another angle, one sees that the figures are wearing almost nothing underneath, only suspenders. It is a sadly ironic reference to a very successful Bulgarian export: young women who work as prostitutes in other countries. The latest fictitious photo series, New Hedonism (2006), is concerned with the women who have stayed in Bulgaria and are making careers. The theme is a new generation of childless women. Georgieva is concerned with the question of how natural instincts, such as »maternal feelings« can be sustained in a consumer society. New heroines, or losers in the New Bulgaria?
Kosta Tonev
Kosta Tonev (*1980) has been studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna since 2004, but he maintains close contacts with the scene in Sofia and from autumn he will also be represented in the new gallery ARC Projects. One work, concerned with art education in Bulgaria, is Monument to My Bad Drawing (2006). A panel, which has three rows of skull-and-crossbones symbols printed on the top part, has a text in the lower part in which Tonev tells of his drawing lessons, when he was expected to create a pattern for some textile. »I was aware that the narrow guidelines made the repeated images uniform in their representation which might discourage individuality,« you can read there (in English) as well as, »I saw the only way to express uniqueness was through the image itself.«
Tonev has long engaged, in an ironic manner, with the highly political topic of the monument and has been trying to redefine the concept. For his work Monuments to Various Short Presences (2006), which he exhibited in the small Italian/Slovenian town Gorizia or Nova Gorica, he photographed, for example, a bird on a pavement stone and monumentalised it by presenting it greatly enlarged on many billboards.
Ivan Moudov
Ivan Moudov (*1975) will also be represented at this year’s Venice Biennale. For his work Traffic Control, which plays on the arbitrary political power-relationships in Bulgaria, Moudov »directs« the traffic at a crossing in Graz, dressed as a policeman, until he is arrested by the local police. Manipulation of road traffic is often a component in his actions. For example, in his video, 1 Hour Priority (2002) we see him driving, for exactly one hour, around a roundabout in Sofia. His works are above all characterised by interweaving reality and art subversively with each other. They remind one, not least, of performance artists like Jí_i Kovanda, who worked in the 1970s with minimal interventions, such as eye contact with passers-by. Critics call Moudov a »Post-Conceptualist«, and that is particularly interesting because Bulgaria has no tradition of Conceptual Art. His work Wind of Change was shown by the artist at the Moscow Biennale in 2005. On the roof of the Lenin Museum Moudov had installed a wind machine that supplied energy to the surveillance cameras inside the building. When there is no wind, however, there is also no image on the surveillance monitors and the art treasures are at risk of vandalism and theft. It is a pastiche on the corrupt systems that »turn with the wind«.