Swimming Pool invites you to the launch of "While the Plum Trees Grow," a photo book by Lars Nordby, Erik Nordby, Karima Risk, and Knut Nordby, with accompanying texts by Luchezar Boyadjiev and Hanna Gjelten Hattrem in English and Bulgarian.
Join us for drinks and talks on the terrace, and for a conversation between Luchezar Boyadjiev and Lars Nordby about the project.
"While the Plum Trees Grow" is a photographic story taking place in the Veliko Turnovo region, specifically in the rural village of Vishovgrad, where four Norwegian artists – Lars Nordby, Erik Nordby, Karima Risk, and Knut Nordby – established their home and studios а few years ago. The book looks into the apparently frozen, yet vastly affected by Western neoliberalism, post-communist state. The photographs capture not only architecture and interiors, but also everyday life moments, both spontaneous and carefully composed.
In the words of Luchezar Boyadjiev, "This collection of photographs is an incredible visual penetration of many Bulgarians’ way of life, in fact – most Bulgarians. There is nothing flattering nor analytical. There is everything human; a human eye behind a camera that uses the tool to establish a shared ground of humanity with the photographs’ subjects" (excerpt from the essay "A Blind Date with a Country," part of the publication).
More information about "While the Plum Trees Grow" here.
The book launch takes place in the framework of "The Library of Our Encounters" – a long-term project by Swimming Pool dedicated to what has changed most radically lately: the encounter – as event, presence, time, and meaning. The library contains a growing selection of books, carefully collected over the last few years, but it also foregrounds itself as a possible space for a series of encounters among words, ideas, silences, people, aiming to reconsider the trajectory of our thinking in recent months of crisis. "The Library of Our Encounters" was developed in 2020 in collaboration with Christoph Szalay and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, in the frame of RadOST and the Eastern European Artist-In-Residence-Exchange of Akademie Schloss Solitude, with the support of Goethe-Institut Bulgarien.
The event is free, and everyone is welcome.
