Category: Installations and Objects

A Sign of Faith and Devotion

A Sign of Faith and Devotion
2021, white neon, white polar fox and zip ties, 150x80cm

Part of the project:
WHITE EXHIBITION

The best thing about this work is that moral categories are being rethought and there is no hint to the viewer whether to feel ferocious or outraged. The direction is clearly set by the good old symbolism of materials and means of expression – the juxtaposition between neon, cable ties, and ultra-luxurious polar fox cloak raises the question of the relationship between toxic masculinity, misogyny and cruelty to animals. It is also a question of morality – about the woman who can be bought; about the successful woman, which is immediately labeled as a bitch and deprived of her femininity; it is about condemnation in general. 

Daniela Radeva

photo: Kalin Serapionov

I Confess

I Confess
2019, pink neon, diameter 40cm

Part of the project:
SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN HEAVEN

Last year, it became something usual to hear about murders or violence against women. The subject has become particularly media-intensive and politically loaded with the passions around the Istanbul Convention. Between the apathy, speculation, anger, horror, and the new, yet conservative wave of protection of family values, the door to the real debate has gradually begun to open – why is this happening and how do we react as a society – as citizens, but also as human beings.
The exhibition of Iskra Blagoeva tries to open this particular door, shocking us a bit, worrying us and most of all confusing the stereotypes, with which we imperceptibly and inevitably live. For one year, the artist has been exploring the topic of the woman – murderer, looking for anchor points in psychology, mythology, poetry and religion. Documentary stories, part of the information flow, real life news give grounds for this, and the references made by the artist go far beyond. Guiding the audience through the themes of vanity and obsession with the new narcissistic culture, crime and sin, holiness, degradation and lack of remedy, confession and forgiveness, the author creates an overall installation in the space where the works complement and build on each other and “tell” about the contents of the exhibition along the vertical of the very Water Tower.
At the heart of the project stands the woman, but this exhibition is not only about women, insofar as the issue of violence therein is addressed as an act of treacherous superiority of the stronger over the weaker. Contrary to the expectations that human problems are discussed through the male image, Iskra Blagoeva has chosen to show the audience not the god-like Adam, but the sinful Eve. Are women-murderers abusers or victims; are they different from men in their role as oppressors and where to draw the line between strength and weakness, between fall and retribution? The two portraits in the exhibition relate to real women who killed in a cruel way their male partners. The artist creates images that are devoid of sentimentality or drama, who seduce with their fragility but also chill with their indifferent alienation and their pale stone faces. By putting haloes above their heads, the author provokes the audience, testing the limits of what we perceive as normal. At the same time, however, she makes a comment on the devoid of substance religiousness, which has become conservative scholasticism, insensitive to the contradictions of human life.
Without expressly highlighting that she engages in the situation in Bulgaria, Iskra Blagoeva’s exhibition comments on many of the current problems in our country, from the murders (of women) through the growing alienation and violence among people, to the devaluation of values, the lack of adequate institutions, the degradation of faith and the chaos in the orientations for the world. This is an exhibition that uses the scandalous and even the horrible to turn to the forgotten role of art to talk about human choice, ethics, saints, and sinners.
The visiting project – the film “Five Years and Five Months” by the directors Andrey Getov and Neda Sokolovska – further underlines the timeliness and the specificity of the problems that motivate the very exhibition, by telling about the problems of the women’s prison in Sliven and the degrading treatment of the women there.

Vladiya Mihaylova, Curator

Never Forever

Never Forever
2015, installation, ICA Sofia Gallery

“The one-artist show of Iskra Blagoeva in ICA-Sofia Gallery is woven out of contradictions. The artist is relaying on visual impact while at the same time composing her objects as obvious or hidden references, hints and quotations waiting to be deciphered.
The used light and color are symptomatic. They are reorganizing the very space of the gallery. The allover glamour of the environment is invaded by text. The fishing pole is marked as a S&M accessory; the musical “merry-go-round” is small and suspended from the ceiling like those toys over a baby’s cradle. It shines and glistens in a fury of pseudo-Swarovski utensils from the beauty markets. The rose neon sign “Never Forever” insistently introduces a hint of whining for the unfulfilled eternal love, happiness, beauty, youth…
The overly beautified atmosphere which the artist has created is triggering the sensation of pretense, and the feeling of unrest and insecurity. Passion and frustration, emptiness and satiation, the feminine and the “lady’s” characteristics are contesting each other as a commentary on the gender identity. The woman envisioned in the show is a product – of gossip and the laic opinion, of media generalizations and statistical manipulation, of misunderstanding and lack of respect, of her own insecurity.”

Iara Boubnova, curator

The work has four components:

01: “Dizziness is not Fear” is a children’s music toy, like the once put above the baby’s cot. It plays the popular song “Love me tender”, attracting the viewers with the shining, artificial, obviously cheep and kitschy jewelry.

 

02: “Emma, Don’t Jump in Neva!”
A fishing rod, turned into a strange whip. The work is dedicated to Emma Goldman, who is known as a rebel, an anarchist, an ardent proponent of birth control and free speech, a feminist, a lecturer and a writer. When Emma was a young girl she witnessed a peasant being whipped with a knout  in the street. This event traumatized her and contributed to her lifelong distaste for violent authority. In 1885 Goldman wanted to join her sister, who made plans to move to New York, but their father refused to allow it. Desperate, Goldman threatened to throw herself into the Neva River if she could not go.

Collaboration with Neva Balnikova

 

03: A red curtain framing the whole space. The title “Problema YYY” refers to the PMS (premenstrual syndrome) which in 90’s has been declared as a disease mostly due to the policy of the drug companies developing a new market. The piece is based on the research of Julia T. Wood in her book Gendered Media: The Influence of Media on Views of Gender. She describes the problem as follows – “Facts aside, the myth has cough on, carrying in its wake women and men who now perceive normal monthly changes as abnormal and as making women unfit for positions of leadership and authority. Another consequence of defining PMS as a serious problem most women suffer is that it leads to labeling women in general as deviant and unreliable, an image that fortifies long-held biases against women.”

04: “Never Forever”, pink neon

photo: Kalin Serapionov

What is Love Without Magic?

What is Love Without Magic?
2013, text and audio files

I invited three psychologists, to analyze the human relations which lie beyond the spell and which would be revealed by “removing” it:
Darin Tenev (Literary critic interested in psychology, Professor at Sofia University, Bulgaria)
Cesare Pietroiusti (Professor of Fine Arts, Psychologist)
Radoslav Ivanov (Clinical psychologist, member of the Bulgarian Society of analytical psychology “K.G.Jung”)
Their analyses of the spell are collected in a folder, which accompanies the text on the wall.

“A Love Spell”
This is done in the following way: On a full moon night, when everybody is asleep, a woman well-versed in charms strips stark naked and in complete silence kneads and bakes a round loaf, without anyone noticing her. Then, still naked, she goes to a stackyard or a meadow, puts the loaf in the middle and has a bowel movement in three spots on its rim. Then she starts making all sorts of gestures and bodily movements, keeping her gaze on the full moon and beckoning it. The moon begins to darken in the sky and like a strange light starts descending to the ground, towards the loaf. The closer it gets to the ground, the more it looks like a nice roan cow, which finally puts its hooves on the round loaf. The woman milks red milk from the cow into a pot. Then she starts making gestures and bodily movements again, as if to take the cow back. The latter starts going back, its cow appearance gradually fading away and eventually appearing in the sky in its real form. Then the woman goes back home, kneads a new loaf with the red milk she had milked from the moon and only then she puts her clothes on. All should be done on a single night, all alone and in complete silence, and the woman should be golopara (stark naked). A piece of the moon milk loaf should be somehow given to a lad who does not love a particular girl, so that he loves her and makes her his wife, or to a maid who does not love a lad.”

The text was found in the book Collection of Folk Mindings and Folklore by brothers Dimitar and Kostadin Molerov, edited by Acad. Romanski and published in Sofia / Bulgaria in 1954.

text: Radoslav Ivanov
voice: Leonid Jovchev

text: Darin Tenev
voice: Gerassim Slavov

text: Cesare Pietroiusti

Can you feel this, princess?

Can you feel this, princess?
2013, 180x70cm, foam matress, 28 epilators

The work refers to the popular fairy tale The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Anderson. The object is shaped like a Fakir’s bed of nails, insinuating discomfort, pain and at the same time infantile naivité. It is a comment on the demands on the contemporary beauty industry and the phantasmal world of Barbie culture.