Artist Statement:
It’s sad that the revolutionary, utopian and rebellious charge of the 20th century’s underground and youth subcultures has been lost.
Nowadays, the legacy of these alternative currents has been reduced to trends, fashions and posturing that mimics the masses’ commercial ideas of the underground’s radical pasts.
The pathos and subversive tactics with which the underground attempted to reimagine and change the future have been replaced with an eclectic imitation of what was heard about the lifestyle of the time.
Even more repulsive is the fact that some of the most politically active contemporary subcultures are entirely reactionary, conservative, oppressive and radically right-wing. Communities that are fiercely trying to trample on what has been won.
Against the backdrop of political and social problems and the growing ecological crisis, it is all the sadder that almost all of us stand like angels, similar to Klee’s Angelus Novus, which Walter Benjamin wrote about in 1920. Beautiful but with no possibility for action.
Like angels, we watch the accumulating misery of history without any opportunity to build the new, yet we continue to sustain cultural life. We repeat learned behavioral patterns of cult figures and movements without the passion for another future. There’s only a pro-forma rebellion that fades with youth. Cultural life is only an outlet for us in late capitalism.
This project is an attempt to deconstruct subcultures, personalities and the self. It is an attempt to illustrate the performativity and lack of alternative futures in today’s cultural life, and at the same time, a project to celebrate the potential for change and the free life in spite of everything.
Text: Georgi P. Pavlov
Pavlov’s current exhibition is motivated by the natural reaction of a young author who dares to explore the terrain of his own ground, his motivation as an artist and an analyst of cultural processes. In this process, as spontaneous as it is logical, he directly comments on the failure of modernity, and of the post-history we inhabit and fill with post-culture.
The works presented in the exhibition as form and content bear the marks of a primal commentary, a rebellion, albeit a personal one. The literal dressing of mirrored surfaces in clothes symbolic of counterculture masks the spectators’ reflections, while articulating the artist’s position. Objects and appropriations forming an artistic mass on the edge of what is acceptable as art and as taste remind us of the liminal nature and territory where the lost link between the authenticity of subcultural movements and the contemporary situation is sought. The project includes a significant element that shapes in the text a more theoretical but also emotional critique of an issue rarely defined by representatives of the generation. The exhibition also comments on several other themes (including authorship, power, role and position, social fabric, environment, and the interactions between them) while asking personal, but universally valid questions insofar as the personal rebellion within is against anything secondarily.
Curator: Yovo Panchev
Georgi P. Pavlov (b. 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and theorist based in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and an MA in Arts and Contemporary Studies (XX – XXI century) from Sofia University “Saint Kliment Ohridski”
He works mainly with performance, experimental music and various mixed media. His artistic interests include the formation and deconstruction of identity, creativity against the backdrop of global crises, the body as the artist’s main tool, various social and political issues, and questioning the boundaries of audience/author, process/product, among others.
He participates, organizes and curates numerous cultural events (concerts, performances, exhibitions, etc.) solo and as part of Synaesthesia Collective. Since 2023 he has been a part of Sofia Underground International Performance Art Festival’s team as a curator and artist.
Significant participations include: Second BUNA – Forum for Contemporary Art, SPORNO FEST 2024 curated by Voin de Voin, Sofia Underground 2022, 2023, 2024, To Defy The Status Quo, 2023 – group exhibition curated by Voin de Voin at Doza/AEther Hague, Sofia Experimental 2023 and Synaesthesia Collective’s Obrazcov Dom project (2023), Club DOM, with the performance “I’ve Always Wanted…”