Exhibition featuring: Alla Georgieva – Genadi Gatev – Ivan Bogdanov – Ivan Kyuranov – Yoana Angelova Yoana Kaludova – Kaloyan Bogdanov – Lilyana Karadzhova – Lyudmila Magdalena Peter Tsanev – Petko Durmana – Rosen Toshev – Rositsa Getsova – Svilen Stefanov Curator: Genadi Gatev Today, it is increasingly difficult to define the essence of photography or determine its character. Since the nineteenth century, it has imposed the maintenance of a visual order presumed to be both universal and neutral. “Is photography art or not?” This question accompanied its entire history until, in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin transformed it into: “Has photography not changed the very nature of art?” Contemporary information technologies and the circulation of images have constructed a space that is no longer geographical, but rather a space of contracting time. It is a magically reconstructed reality, transformed into a global visual scenario. This total visuality not only displaces the hegemony of the millennia-old culture of the text, but also “forgets” the image’s original character as an orienting principle. This leads to amnesia, in which life itself becomes a function of images—the past is revealed as unconvincing, the present is determined by the clichéd normativity of concepts, and the linearity of history becomes blurred between fact and fiction. The technological environment changes not only art, but also transforms space and alters consciousness, sensations, and perceptions. Reality is transformed into an illusion of reality, in which images sustain the illusion of participation in what is happening—participation in post-history, post-truth, or post-art!? This brings to the fore the question of rethinking events, i.e. breaking free from the illusion of participation. Could photography, which has led us to this condition, now offer us an alternative to contemporaneity and a way out of an environment where anything is possible and where norms, criteria, and rules are absent!? The artists in the exhibition seek to answer this question by presenting a new interpretation of the image. This is an exhibition in which the medium is used to reconsider the nature of the very idea of art. The works in the exhibition are not simply photographic images. They embody a sense of indeterminacy, a state of compressed time and hypertrophied space. They are illusory, utopian, and speculative, while simultaneously expressing a desire to escape the hallucination of contemporaneity and to rethink existence. The visual experience lies beyond the framework of a single truth, beyond the established chronology of history, and beyond subjectivity. Through photography, contemporary art invites us to undergo constant transformations. Today, the photographic medium confronts that which lies beyond it: that which opens up experimental ways of perceiving and responding to uncertainty. The works included in the exhibition show us that not everything about photography has yet been said, nor could it ever be said in full. The only thing we can be certain of is that after photography comes… photography once again. Genadi Gatev
