Tuesday August 20, 2024 | 6:00pm
Location: Residency Unlimited
360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn NY 11231 (map)
In addition to taking place in-person at RU, this program will be streamed online via Zoom at this link.
Artists Krasimira Butseva (currently in residence at RU) and Julian Chehirian will discuss their work on “The Neighbours“, currently on view at the National Pavilion of Bulgaria at the 60th Venice Biennale.
“The Neighbours“, created by Butseva, Chehirian & Lilia Topouzova, and curated by Vasil Vladimirov, is a multimedia installation about how we remember, carry and forget trauma. Through the interplay of video projections, ambient sounds, and artefacts recovered from the former sites of violence, the installation visually juxtaposes the camps’ material world with the space of the home, evoking how traumatic memories permeate daily life while inviting the audience to bear witness. The exhibition excavates the silenced memories of survivors of state violence from Bulgaria’s socialist era (1945-1989) and explores the latter’s troubling legacy in the present. During this period, countless individuals were sent to forced labour camps without trial, faced imprisonment, systematic persecution, forced resettlement and ethnic assimilation – political dissidents, peasants who refused to give up their land, artists, queer people, Muslim minorities and everyday people who defied the regime’s ideology.
Sonorizing such silences, “The Neighbours” emerges from the artist-researchers’ collaborative work between archives, field work, ethnographic encounters and studio practices across twenty years of research and ten years of artistic process.
About
Krasimira Butseva is a visual artist and researcher based in Sofia and London. She is a Senior Lecturer at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. In her creative and academic practice, Butseva works with trauma, memory, political violence, official and unofficial history, whilst employing video, sound, photography and installation as mediums. She has taken part in solo and group exhibitions in London, Brighton, Ipswich, Portsmouth, Gosport, Pingyao, Sofia, Plovdiv, Lovech, Cape Town, Kyiv, Belgrade, Berlin, and Stuttgart. Krasimira is the recipient of the 2022 BAZA/Young Visual Artist Award for emerging visual artists in Bulgaria.
Julian Chehirian is a multimedia artist and researcher living between Philadelphia and Sofia. He is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Princeton University, USA. Julian creates site-specific multimedia installations that employ modified objects, video, sound, and experimental technologies. In his scholarship, he writes on the history of attention and psychotherapy, post-war art and transnational history. His writing has appeared in edited collections for Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, Bloomsbury, in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and in The Public Domain Review.
This program benefits from the support of The Trust for Mutual Understanding.
