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Curator: Galia Dimitrova
Artists: Antony and George Raijekovi, Anton Terziev, Bogdan Alexandrov and Georgy Minchev, Boriana Ventsislavova and Miroslav Nichich, Evgeni Vasilev, Ivailo Hristov, Kamen Stoyanov and Vasilena Gankovska, Nadejda Oleg Liahova, Vanya Valkova, Vesela Mihailova.
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The Global and the Man exhibition is a vision of the world today and the man in it. Although this special interrelationship is one of the most ancient existential cases, the thing that makes it interesting as before is its changing substances – the world and its contemporaries. This applies especially to the present time when science and technologies, as well as the process of globalization, are changing people’s lives at extremely fast rates. Thus, the modern world is identified with global markets, global media and global culture – all of them created by and for the man. Now is the time of mobility and comfort, when you can travel wherever you want, and founding yourself even in the most remote place in the world you can watch TV, drink Coca-Cola, draw money from your credit card…
Undoubtedly, the process of globalization has grown as much as to became part of the everyday life of people all over the world. The invasion of the mass media, the products and the services of big commercial corporations has turned this process into a phenomenon concerning all spheres of the modern society. Therefore, the consequences of this process are ambiguously taken up and have their supporters and opponents. This can be easily explained by the fact that beyond the dull term, describing the globalization as “breaking the bounds for ideas, investments and capital flows and movements of people and production processes all over the world” (Jim O'Neill / Roopa Purushothaman, The Challenge of the Century: Getting Globalization Right, Goldman Sachs Global Report 89, 2003), remain the consequences of this process that have entered people’s homes and lives and influenced their most personal affairs and needs. They has brought the “luxury” of being constantly aware of what is going on in the world, communicating virtually with people from different countries, trying various national dishes, and on the whole – gain knowledge of different cultures, religions and traditions, although frequently in a superfluous way turning things into an attraction or an easy-to-understand substance. Just like fast-food culture, which has turned into a metaphor of the globalization, and describes the dominating Anglo-American culture as a whole.
Globalization also contributed to the distribution of systems of standards of production, consumption and even behavior that lead to unification and depersonalization of conventions and models. Hence, some critics of the process consider this over-information and consumption-oriented consciousness of people as the source of alienation and indifference to the things that happen around the world and especially to those regional, national and ethnic features that bear cultural identity.
Therefore, we inevitably come to one of the basic problems of globalization – identity. It is discussed as a code differentiating one cultural situation from another, or simply as a distinction between own and alien. Yet, what should not be underestimated is the fact that confrontations between own and alien, that globalization normally favors, make the constitution of identity possible. That is why supporters of globalization claim that as it gives opportunity for more frequent and easier breaking of boundaries, it leads to no loss of identity, but rather to ceaseless multiplication of identities as result of meetings between various identities.
The interest of the project is how do individuals perceive all these processes and find their places and reflections in them. We looked for an answer in the works of artists that have always been the stratum of society that most sensibly and critically respond to problems of the kind. For the purpose, we announced a national contest on the topic The Global and the Man and selected ten of the received projects, which have been realized and shown in this exhibition. This is how the participants interpreted the topic:
In A Global piece of Sky Vesela Mihailova builds a general human silhouette combining the variety of ethoses, religions and traditions in the globalizing world by means of a collage of multitude of photos of different people and places under the background of the sky serving as a relating motive among all of them.
BIG MAG shows the ironical-critical view of Nadejda Oleg Liahova on the Bulgarian official policy on the verge of our acceptance in EU, which perceives the Bulgarian culture only as a tourist attraction, pride of a great past that is based on the evaluation given by foreigners.
AZ, the work of Ivailo Hristov, is a vision of the inside, the spiritual aura of the man. The painting treats the topic of the private space, the ego and its relationship with the environment in the form of a boy wanting to fly.
Search Patterns multimedia installation by Evgeni Vasilev treats the search as an innermost part of human nature. By visualizing the results of the search of information in the Internet, the author shows the content – vision interrelationship that most frequently escapes our notice but is quite curious.
Media Box audio-visual triptych is another vision of the media as a main source of globalization. By looking at the photo-collages representing the basic types of media, the visitors create melodies that indirectly show the way they perceive the images, resp. the media.
Constantly opening doors in the video installation by Anton Terziev raise the question of what is behind them and the dilemma between our own concepts and reality.
The project of Kamen Stoyanov and Vasilena Gankovska, where the relation food - people is presented in the two forms of communication: market and supermarket, focuses on Gastronomy as another leading emanation of globalization.
“Where is my private living space?”, asks Vanya Valkova in her project, which presents the stories of five people – modern nomads, whose lives are real metaphors of one of the key signs of globalization – the mobility of people.
The video project We Are on The Way to Find You by Boriana Ventsislavova and Miroslav Nichich treats the systems of behavior, perception and representation in the modern world and the function of the man in the global network of systems by presenting scenes and actions with a surrealistic touch.
“Formats of the Endless. Manifest” project by Bogdan Alexandrov and Georgy Minchev treats a particular manifest of the invisible specter in the context of visual arts. The relation to the global (world), shown in the micro cosmos of paintings by an outist as a point of intersection between the visible and the invisible, is the starting point of the project.
Hence The Global and the Man exhibition creates a curious context bringing together the varied visions of artists on the equally varied aspects of globalization. Thus, every single project treats the ticklish and intriguing sequence of problems and identifications in the modern world. Yet, the man is in the center of all art works as an object, subject or … mediator.
Galina Dimitrova
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http://artcontact.postbank.bg/
http://sfumato.info/
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