Physicists say that when you approach a black hole your time and space stretch so much that movement becomes imperceptible. Something similar happened to all of us with the start of the year 2020. An invisible threat threw us abruptly into a state close to an event horizon - a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer. The gravity of our private bunkers became so strong that light from outside started escaping the reduced trajectories of movement.
And when the stimuli from the outside world vanish and you start living inside the walls of your own skull but you are a visually thinking body i.e. artist, you start reanimating the world from what you still have at your disposal – memory.
The two moving image series presented in this exhibition by Alexander Schellow and Kalin Serapionov, appeared during the first lockdown in the spring of 2020. They both had public presence in social media as the only channel of interpersonal communication left effective during that time of self-isolation. They both reconstructed “a world” of fragments, leftovers and side-effects as a therapeutic way to stay sane and keep the world running.
Vector. ICA-Sofia: Motives, Analyses, Critique is a project by the Institute of Contemporary Art - Sofia. The project is realised with the financial support of the National Fund Culture, Critique Programme
