“A Few Ways to Win the World”
“A Few Ways to Win the World” is a show of gazes. It opens with the direct stares of the Slavic fairies whose charms lead men to their death in Martina Vacheva’s Samodivi, 2019, and of the lone dancer on a snowy mountaintop in Gery Georgieva’s Rhodopska Beyoncé (Auto-Ethnography II), 2013, who performs the “Single Ladies” dance in traditional clothing from the Rhodopi region. There’s no music, just gusts of wind, jangling jewelry, the occasional handclap, but there is no mistaking the moves.
Who is watching whom? And how do the eyes of the state, the camera, the Western world, shape one’s sense of self? This exhibition assembles highlights of Bulgarian contemporary art through the (lightly) fictionalized gaze of an outsider: the Centre Pompidou in Paris, whose director Xavier Rey recently made a trip to Sofia to discuss acquiring pieces for its collection. The works on view play out questions of observation, including within the self, as seen in Luchezar Boyadjiev’s How many nails in the mouth?, 1992–95. The original sketch of the artist’s mouth stuffed with metal nails almost five inches long comes from an exercise in envisioning the self as the other, a vision that was later realized as passport photos, here displayed alongside the drawing. As a crowning touch, curators Vera Mlechevska and Dessislava Dimova also include a small case with the nails used for the photos.
Among the other artifacts of Bulgarian contemporary art is a certificate for Nedko Solakov’s, View to the West, 1989. The seminal work was installed on the roof terrace of the Union of Bulgarian Artists and consisted of a bronze plate inscribed with the title and a telescope angled westward to the red star atop the Bulgarian Communist Party headquarters, filling the view of all who looked through it.
Today, more than thirty years after Bulgaria’s Communist government collapsed, views to and from the West still obscure the lens. The question of what Bulgarian works should be showcased for a local audience remains to be answered.
