In 2010, the gallery, in cooperation with Open Arts Foundation, invited the young curator Vladiya Mihaylova. The project is the result of her joint work with the artists Kiril Kuzmanov and Svetoslav Michev whose works, included in the project, are artistic interventions in the space of Kapana quarter in Plovdiv. The choice of the public space declared the interest of Sariev Gallery and Open Arts Foundation in this quarter by participation in the policy of the foundation towards reconsideration and discussion of the urban space through artistic practices.
Project 01 made Kapana quarter its own theme. On a conceptual level, it treats the problem of the lack of a uniform image by setting itself the task to rationalise, on the one hand, the possible fields in which this image appears, and on the other hand, the connection between an image and a specific urban space. The two artists’ works which are included in the project are connected not so much with the creation of certain items/works but with the idea to establish a conceptual framework. They treat the problems of the status of the author and the work of art, as well as the work with a specific space, set by the conceptual art, the art in the public space, and the rationalisation of the connections between the work of art and the specific urbanistic and architectural environment.
The project was launched as an artistic intervention in the space of Kapana quarter and an exhibition at Sariev Gallery.
Vladiya Mihaylova about the artists: The two artists’ works set the problem of the place within a social, cultural and philosophical sense by drawing borders in the space of Kapana quarter.
Svetoslav Michev (1) conducted a survey consisting of only one question “What is Kapana?” in four places, which are like passageways between the district and the adjacent parts of the city. He selected part of the answers in sequences of words, each of which ended in “is Kapana” and placed them on banners exactly at the places where the survey had been conducted. In this way Svetoslav Michev built a strange conceptual architecture of the existing image of Kapana, and by that he aimed at reactivating the social imagination about the place.
Kiril Kuzmanov’s (0) work was connected with the construction of a large double mirror in one of the narrowest and smallest streets of the quarter. The mirror consisted of separate fragments. Its contour followed the relief of the facades of the buildings lined on both sides of the street, and crossed it in a perpendicular direction. Kiril Kuzmanov is one of the few young artists in the country who consciously consider the problem of the status of the work of art and the artist’s role in the present-day art system. The leading idea for him is the creation of a work of art which is non-material and non-object. Relieved from the task to give meaning and from the ever-ideologised function to carry a certain message or meaning, in his notion the work of art functions rather as a filter in a certain space. A special type of medium, whose frame tended to be the possible zero of meanings, symbols, and ideologies. The project for the building of the mirror in Kapana quarter was an attempt exactly in this direction. With a view to putting additional emphasis on the unusual status of a product of the mirror, which at the same time is and is not a sculpture, is and is not architecture, the artist separates the authorship from the possession of the work. Each of the separate fragments of the mirror had to be sold in advance, and in this way the work of art would not belong to its author at the moment of its realisation. The cost of the fragments was determined by the cost of the materials necessary for the production of each of them. Created for a very specific space, the work had to be mounted and dismantled completely, and in its last form it had to disintegrate into its constituent fragments.
The exhibition at Sariev Gallery presented Kiril Kuzmanov’s project and initiated the real process of collecting applications for mirror fragments.
(text parts by Vladiya Mihaylova for the project’s newspaper in 2010)
