Artists from Bulgaria, the USA, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine will take part in an exhibition in the historic center of Sofia and online, dealing with the concepts of intimacy and spectacle in the age of social media.
Sofia Art Projects Vol. 1
Intimacy and spectacle in the age of social media
June 10-20, 2021
Largo’s subway under Independence Square and online
(Ancient cultural and communication complex Serdika)
Curators: Desislava Dimova, Vera Mlechevska, Vessela Nozharova
Participants: Aneta Mona Kisha and Lucia Tkatsova (CZ / SK), Victor Ruban (UA), Ivan Mudov (BG), Krassimira Butseva (BG / UK), Lazar Lyutakov (BG / AT), Pauline Bodri and Renate Lorenz (CH) , Sasho Stoitsov (BG), Stella Vasileva (BG), Tracy Snelling (US)
Are there really boundaries between art and life that we would like to keep? – ask the curators of the project “Intimacy and spectacle in the age of social media” Desislava Dimova, Vera Mlechevska and Vessela Nozharova. In the first edition of the Sofia Art Projects initiative, they explore borderline situations, frameworks and platforms where parallel and blurry representations of art and the public sphere are possible.
Between June 10 and 20, Bulgarian and foreign artists will intervene with their art installations, performances and screenings on the territory of Serdica’s Decumanus Maximus and online, making sense of the current dynamic situation in which personal space and performance are constantly swapping places. The places of the exhibition will be shops and shop windows in the subway under Independence Square, as well as the space under the glass dome of Largo.
After a year of lull in artistic life and a little art that has reached us from abroad, Sofia Art Projects focuses on the international aspect and exchange. Well-known artists from Bulgaria, the USA, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine take part in the exhibition.
The artists will present mainly new and specially created projects for the exhibition. Tracy Snelling from the USA will participate with her miniature cities, this time the result of her two-week stay and impressions of the architecture and life of Sofia. The choreographer Victor Ruban from Ukraine will work with young people and passers-by, with whom he will create choreography among Largo and among the exhibition itself. The legendary car “Sofia” – the first and only car in Bulgarian design, will be presented as an art project and historical artifact by the artist Lazar Lyutakov, and the artist Stella Vasileva will transform the space under the glass dome of Largo through light. The artist Ivan Mudov will get involved with both sculpture and his new performance, in which he experiments with a typical practice of begging for money by collecting garbage from South Africa. The young artist Krassimira Butseva deals with her work with moments from the history of the specific place. Sasho Stoitsov, one of the key figures of Bulgarian contemporary art since the 1980s, will show his new sculptural installation “Baths of Philosophy”. Two international tandems are also taking part in the exhibition. One duo is that of Aneta Mona Kisha and Lucia Tkatsova, who take part with the installation of one of the windows in the subways. Pauline Bodri and Renate Lorenz will show a film in which the Venezuelan singer Aérea Negrot sings at Oranienplatz in Berlin, where until 2014 there is a protest refugee camp.
In addition to the on-site exhibition in Largo, Sofia Art Projects will also include online streaming with art films and performances by 15 artists from Bulgaria and Europe. The program “Her Accurate Private Mind” is a curatorial experiment with the online form, which became mandatory in the last year of the pandemic, but also with the place of art in popular social platforms. The streaming will be broadcast on the Twitch platform, popular mostly among gamers.
More information: www.sofiaartprojects.com
Sofia Art Projects is a project of the Art – Cases and Documents Foundation with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria, as well as with the support of Sofia Municipality, Regional History Museum – Sofia, US Embassy in Bulgaria and Austrian Embassy.
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