As part of the project “Art and Politics” of the Goethe-Institut Bulgaria, 14 young artists created a printed publication, asking questions about whether art can and should be political and talk about social, political and economic issues. A few months later we can see the premiere of the collaborative poster works in a pop-up exhibition in the gallery of the Goethe-Institut.
As a culmination of the long-term project “Art and Politics” on April 27 at 6.30 pm Goethe-Institut Bulgaria will present in its gallery the first and only issue of the newspaper Pleasure & Pressure, created by 14 young Bulgarian artists in a workshop of the same name, led by Lachezar Boyadzhiev. The pop-up exhibition will show the result of the collective work of the artists Antonia Dimitrova, Antoni Raizhekov, Boyana Dzhikova, Galina Dimitrova-Dimova, Krassimira Butseva, Mirjana Todorova, Nikola Mihov, Radostin Sedevchev, Raina Teneva, Sofia Grancharova, Harita Asumani and Yana Lineva. In addition to the collection of visual and social experiments exploring the boundary between art and politics and documenting the authors’ views on art beyond institutions, visitors will have the opportunity to meet curator Lachezar Boyadzhiev and some of the project participants and learn how to create an exhibition from a newspaper.
Pleasure & Pressure is a newspaper, art publication and exhibition – a multifunctional publication that can be easily transformed in any place that readers want and in any form they want. For this purpose, the pages of the newspaper should be divided and the works that best reflect the curatorial intuition of the reader for art and politics should be selected. The exhibition consists of eight artistic projects that can be arranged in an almost infinite number of combinations. The works are provoked by the present, and each reading of them brings new interpretations. Despite their differences, the 24 pages of the publication follow specific synchronicity in the way the artists treat the topic of the connection between art and politics. “Starting from the shared doubt about art politics, we came to an exemplary agreement regarding art policies or any other sphere of life in our society,” said Lachezar Boyadzhiev, host of the Art and Politics workshop.
Within the premiere presentation of the newspaper, visitors will be able to get an issue (in Bulgarian and / or English) to take home and curate (their first) exhibition all by themselves. A digital version of the publication can be viewed here.
The first and last issue of the newspaper “Pleasure & Pressure” was carried out by the Goethe-Institut Bulgaria together with the Institute for International Relations of Germany.
The Art and Politics project of the Goethe-Institut Bulgaria raises questions about the political role of art historically from the 1920s to the present day. The project started in response to the exhibition “Art and Politics. Clashes and Coexistence ”with works by German artists from the collection of the German Institute for International Relations, as well as an installation by Antoni Raizhekov, and curated by Maria Vasileva. During the exhibition from October 27 to December 9, 2020 at the Structure Gallery, the Goethe-Institut also organized a series of lectures, discussions and performances.
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