Saturday, 6 July 2024, 7.30 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery
Conversation with
Krasimira Butseva | Julian Chehirian | Lilia Topouzova | Vasil Vladimirov
The Neighbours is a multimedia installation about how we remember, carry and forget trauma, presented at this year’s Bulgarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale. The exhibition excavates the silenced memories of survivors of state violence from Bulgaria’s socialist era (1945-1989) and explores the latter’s troubling legacy in the present. During this period, countless individuals were sent to forced labour camps without trial, faced imprisonment, systematic persecution, forced resettlement and ethnic assimilation – political dissidents, peasants who refused to give up their land, artists, queer people, Muslim minorities and everyday people who defied the regime’s ideology. Through the interplay of video projections, ambient sounds, and artefacts recovered from the former sites of violence, the installation visually juxtaposes the camps’ material world with the space of the home, evoking how traumatic memories permeate daily life while inviting the audience to bear witness.
Created by a team of artist-researchers working between the archive, the ethnographic encounter and the studio, The Neighbours unsettles the distinction between scholars and artists. It portrays the role of art in tying together knowledge production with the ability to capture affect – something that often cannot be directly documented or made present.
The curator Vasil Vladimirov will be in conversation with the artists and scholars Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian and Lilia Topouzova. The team behind this year’s Bulgarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale will speak about their methodology of working with silent narratives, trauma, art and history for the past ten years. They will discuss working with purged archives of the Bulgarian secret police, the fragmented recollections of the survivors of political violence, alongside their studio practice, experiments with sound, moving image and installation art, and the concepts behind The Neighbours.
