_tod und tanz
Solo exhibition by Assen Janev
10 – 26.03.2022
we are spinning to the sound
until losing our senses
we give into the rage
of our inner obsessions
we seek maximum bliss
and crash into the surreality of our reality
we celebrate existential emptiness
as a senseless normality
we live next to the abyss
monstrously absent
and ever so close to tipping over
In a confused and not always rationally explicable modern world, increasingly overshadowed by materialism and the loss of the human scale, the growing uncertainty and general alienation among us humans is striking. Thus, aspects such as failure, imperfection, and suppressed feelings come to the fore; a sense of threat emerges.
Fears and uncertainty increasingly define the way we humans relate to life, including the way we deal with reality. Above all, the fear of our own transience. And so, we cling to the material; to the body; to everything fleeting. And we believe what we see. A feeling arises that we are in a permanent “state of emergency.” A situation where all vital forces are devoted to extending life as much as possible. This is evident in the cult of the body and the obsession with youth. In greed, the lack of time, vanity, and the sense of missed opportunities.
But isn’t this clash of ours with the great “darkness” simply the echo of our own lostness? Isn’t it precisely the suppressed consciousness of death that creates problems for us? That which causes us to mutate into a society that has lost the sense of a good and unique life?
In a time when the natural sciences give us the sense that they control many dangers, for us, modern people, the great biological danger—death—perhaps seems like a complete “injustice.” But the call of memento mori is and remains omnipresent. Death is one of the few timeless, transboundary, and intercultural themes. It is an unwavering defender of equality among us humans and a constant companion to life. It is the common thread of all our endeavors; the end point of all the stories that life tells. And so, we humans walk, caught in our lives, as fleeting phenomena, in the cycle of emergence and transition, in the circle of new beginnings and endings, in search of permanence and the perpetuation of our existence.
Assen Janev leads us into the inexplicable and the unknown. And he invites us to the “Totentanz” of life, but not as a kind of rebellion against the inevitable end, but as a dance in the name of life.
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Assen Janev, born in Sofia; graduated in Art and Media Studies, History, and Political Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany; currently lives in Basel, Switzerland. Assen Janev is a multidisciplinary artist who works with various media, including photography, collage, drawing, and painting. In his works, he explores the mechanisms of media representation as well as the ambiguity and construction of human identity. The focus is on issues of individual and collective transformations, memory and transience, diversity and migration, personal and collective myths.
