Viktoria Draganova was invited to curate a talks program within the exhibition Shifting Layers. Young Art at the Museum, curated by Vladiya Mihaylova, at the Sofia City Art Gallery. Below you find the text conceptualizing the program, which will be also published at the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.
“Let the talks within the anniversary exhibition allow us to the potentials of radical poetics.
To begin with, we will attempt a different kind of conversation – not the representative type of talking but the sincere, emotional, empathic attitude. Let these talks be also an attempt for a collective imagination – while sharing our stories, let us leave them open-ended for everyone to try to identify themselves inside.
Let us for a moment abandon critical attitude in respect of art, curating, text. Let us try to talk not by way of analysing and judging, but with a view to the opportunity to discover images and figures, to shape, to name. The openness should be intrinsic. At any one moment we should be able to imagine how all things connect, and in the images we build to create time and space – different from the present, maybe impossible for the time being, but plausible. This is how the institution itself will be transformed as well. It will become the home of what is yet to be.
The poetic potential of art lies in creating a world of the future. Not a different future somewhere else, however, this is a future that lives in us already, and we carry it inside ourselves.
This could also be the opening of a conversation in media res about the essence of art and its function in society. Only through poetics can art be political as well, and change our perception of what is political, establish the political.
The only possible methodology to hold such a conversation is to be radical, i.e. the poetics should be intrinsically formulated in respect of each work of art, each author, and everyone who asks. As we talk about art, the world, and us, let us not take anything for granted.
Here, in the Bulgarian context, there is an available field for us to explore the possibilities of poetics in a comprehensive way, and make this exploration productive in a global world. It is because here, again, certain issues occurring elsewhere too, are manifested probably in their clearest form. In this place we can only outline directions: in some of the works there are hovering demons born out of the paranoid perception of a long substituted reality; in others we discover communities existing fully outside the circle of the politically represented ones; we also find the post-communist consumerism based on going to the extremes; the melancholy associated with the sense of all that failed to happen, failed to take place, of standstill and deficiency; the intimacy, the shame – and their impossibility. The topic of self-determination and identity will invariably be present in the talks as a representation and experience, as a hallucinated image, a phantasm, a reality.
The radical, among other things, has always been related to the excess, which is a step beyond the existing, and liberation. Let us celebrate that too, within this anniversary event.”
20.01., 17-19h
The Emergence of the Political Object with Stanimir Genov, Stoyan Dechev, Mina Minov, Simeon Simeonov, Anton Tsanev
Affect, Space, Beast with Iskra Blagoeva, Ani Vaseva, Voin de Voin, Martin Penev
21.01., 16-18h
Images With Movement, Time, and Atmosphere with Stela Vasileva, Vikenti Komitski, Radostin Sedefchev
Perfections and Imperfections with Albena Baeva, Yasen Zgurovski, Stefan Ivanov, Svetlana Mircheva
In Bulgarian.
Entrance free.
The exhibition, curated by Vladiya Mihaylova, is on view until 4 February 2018. For more information please visit the web page of the Sofia City Art Gallery.
Viktoria Draganova (Frankfurt / Sofia) is a curator and an author, since 2014 she has been the director of the space Swimming Pool in Sofia, which runs a program dedicated to curatorial, artistic, literary and theoretical studies in the field of art. In the past she worked for museum institutions such as Staedel Museum and MMK; at present she is a curator of the Double Feature film program at Schrin Kunsthalle (all based in Frankfurt). Viktoria writes as a freelance author for art catalogues, scientific editions and magazines, and her texts are published in Flash Art International, Frieze, frieze d/e, Mousse Magazine, KubaParis, echogonewrong, blister, etc.
