Curated by Jonathan Watkins

The Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov has been orchestrating scenes of viscerally absurd contradiction since he first emerged as an artist around 1980. For example, in Top Secret, he presented a wooden box of index cards explicitly detailing his own collaboration, as a youth, with the communist secret police—a shockingly brazen admission for a newly post-Soviet nation in 1990, when the work was first shown. Now, for his first major solo exhibition in the UK, Solakov presents a single “best” work from each year of his production. However—and, given his taste for paradox, perhaps only to be expected—the artist has recused himself entirely from the curatorial process, opting instead to open a separate career survey of his own design and without external input in Trento, Italy, this October.

— Matthew Jesse Jackson