“Hey, I am a protégé of muses, with whom my best illusions—about the prince and about freedom—are in a dark conspiracy.” This stanza from the poem “Draft for a Letter to the Beloved” by the late Miryana Basheva, although modified for the needs of the exhibition, became the primary inspiration for the creation of the works. The poetess’s work offers an explicit and highly relevant direct feminist theme, in which the woman is not judged solely from a man’s perspective but is turned toward herself. Despite this suggestion, the exhibition does not propose the conviction that female power needs nothing other than itself. Furthermore, the man is not denied in the overall picture, but the emphasis is placed on liberation. The ideas of liberation from the man and the declaration of the “singularity” of the female gender are reconsidered and reworked by me as a man and as the author of the exhibition. I directed the energy of this crucial moment from the poem toward myself in order to extract my own problematic nature. In the presented paintings, sculptures, drawings, and collages, I derive the meanings of existence from living human interaction so that they may establish themselves in our reality, reaching a direct rejection of it. In this very reality, where my best illusions have taken on the most diverse and exotic cultural and ethnic forms, combined with popular influences from our consumerist world, the image of the so-called muses is shaped. These are not only my illusions of freedom, gender equality, and the faiths we live with, but it turns out they live in each of us; consequently, the muses are shared…
The opening date was not chosen by chance to be on the first of April; although the themes presented are by no means a joke, I present to you an exhibition with a dose of humor and self-irony appropriate for my style. Until April 24, on the second floor of the gallery space, you will have the opportunity to see for yourselves the truth of the muses, who in a dark conspiracy turn into our best illusions.
Kaloyan Iliev – Kokimoto
