In Brussels, The Fridge - an independent space created in Sofia by Ivana Nencheva and Natalia Todorova - is giving a pedestal to Voin de Voin.
The Bulgarian artist (b.1978) brings into question here “the current negative geo-political effects on the human being and the state of consciousness." Through a piece titled GAME - Global Anti Migration Elite, the artist joins installation and performance.
What is at the heart of your work?
The work on display at Popposistions is a personal study of the speculations surrounding the tetrad of consecutive “blood moons” (full lunar eclipses) in 2014 and 2015 and the Apocalypse as foretold by the ancient prophets, building on commonly held notions, languages, visual and narrative clichés to introduce the theory of the advent of the post-apocalyptic Mental Age - a state of Woke.
In a postmodern, post-nuclear, post-human, post-Internet era, I find myself, as an alive being, entrapped in various codes, psychic dilution and ‘catastrophobias’. I look to find evidence for our post-apocalyptic existence in the object’s loss of essence, which could result from [psychic] repression.
Displacement, which denotes the unconscious transfer of intense emotion for one object to another, is simultaneously thrilling and disturbing. It is often an unconscious disguise of anxieties related to aggressive claims to the body identities, sexualities, religions. Thus the experience of reality becomes more of an escape route than a way of dealing with it; a space where values generated by dominating factors (such as governments, technologies, capital or disasters) are appropriated. It is by denying “space” its meaning as a distillation of essence and presence that some notions such as “the inner imaginary”, “escape boulevard”, “psychology of nature”, “new eco system”, “the atom as a demonic concentration”, “reproduction and mutation” appear. From building on these borders comes my idea of the “advent of the Mental Era”, which I see as an inner state arising from a new desire for the preservation of life – a desire for a life of the soul.
Your work also seems to be strongly linked to the relationship between the individual and society. Is there any chance contemporary art can have enough power to endorse the message of the fair?
One cannot come to be woke by simply experiencing the political and social disbalance and injustice. It is an inner awakening and revolution that starts inside of each one of us, of our own accord…
This article is part of POPPOSITIONS BRUSSELS | SIX ARTISTS TO OPEN YOUR EYES.
