Contemporary Bulgarian Art exhibit

[Jon Stone]

I'm passing on the details of a unique show that will be opening shortly on the East coast.  There
is also a website (in Bulgarian) with some images:
http://www.aba.government.bg/bg/pages/Projects/BgForum/Image/BG-image.html

Jon Stone
Graduate student, Slavic Dept.
UC Berkeley



Dancing on Embers:
Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Bulgarian Art
Phillips Museum of Art, Lancaster, PA
April 22—July 22, 2005

Dancing on Embers: Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Bulgarian Art presents over 30 recent works
by 10 living Bulgarian artists including Georgi Zaikov, Krustyo Todorov, Galina Yanakieva and
Rumyana Russinova. The exhibition centers around the presence of mythological, religious, and
folkloric references in contemporary Bulgarian art, and argues for the significance of this
incorporation of the distant past. Dancing on Embers reveals a Bulgarian artistic sensibility
resulting from a unique set of historical and social conditions and the juxtaposition of the
country’s relative artistic isolation with the startling lack of strict control over the arts
during the 1970s and 1980s, years formative for the artists represented in the exhibition.

As the first of its kind abroad, the Dancing on Embers exhibition includes Bulgarian artists
working in a wide array of mediums, an array marked by two common themes: the shared destiny of
Bulgarian artists whose style developed during a period of totalitarian control and the common
artistic heritage that has retained an iconographic unity spanning the millennial history of the
country. Dancing on Embers proposes that in an era of newly liberated politics and artistic
expression, of interior ethnic and economic strife, and of the constant influx of Western high-
and low-brow culture, the use of Bulgarian relics and its own distant past serve not as a means of
erasing recent history, nor as a route of escape or renewal, but rather as a reminder of their
long-standing role in the definition and survival of Bulgarian cultural identity.

This exhibition also provides insight into the post-Socialist artistic environment in Bulgaria by
raising questions about the role of the artist, the critic, and the art market in
twenty-first-century democratic Bulgaria. Dancing on Embers examines the effects of the recently
developed art market as well as the impact of the long-term lack of such a commercial system in
the country. The emergence of private collections among the newly rich—former communist leaders,
mafia bosses, and businessmen—has allowed them, rather than critics or cultural institutions to
dictate trends in artistic production. The exhibition argues that due to the relative isolation of
contemporary Bulgarian art from the West, and because no real market for Bulgarian art has yet
developed either within or outside the country, the appreciation of art as a spiritual and
cultural artifact, rather than a means of financial investment has flourished.

Dancing on Embers: Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Bulgarian Art
is curated by Liliana Milkova, doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania
and Kathryn Waggener, senior art history major at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.
An advisory committee will include Dr. Amelia Rauser, associate professor of art history at
Franklin and Marshall College and Dr. Malvina Rousseva of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. An
illustrated catalog with contributions by all will accompany the exhibition.


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