Gallery CUBE – RCCA Toplocentrala, Sofia
“There are moments in an artist’s life and practice when the emotional weight of a particular event makes it difficult to maintain distance, and the works produced during such periods may not entirely become art. Perhaps this exhibition is one such instance. Yet my desire to bring together these works—as responses—is stronger than my aesthetic judgment or any calculation of risk.”
— Pravdoliub Ivanov
Ornaments of Pain brings together drawings, objects, photographs, and video works created by Pravdoliub Ivanov over the past several years. At its core is an installation of more than one hundred drawings produced continuously from the outbreak of the war in Ukraine to the present day.
Recognised for his conceptual practice and his sustained exploration of the relationships between object, form, and language, Ivanov adopts a markedly different approach here. While deeply personal, the exhibition resists direct emotionality. Instead, it occupies a space shaped by empathy and shared human experience, avoiding unequivocal positions or reductive conclusions. As the artist notes, the works emerged as a form of personal therapy, while simultaneously articulating the anxiety, horror, and profound helplessness experienced in the face of ongoing violence.
Ornaments of Pain is not simply an exhibition about the war in Ukraine. Rather, it reflects on the human condition against the backdrop of the civilisational rupture embodied by every war. It speaks to the conditions of the present: an era in which information circulates instantaneously; where truth and falsehood, fact and disinformation increasingly collapse into one another; and where death appears simultaneously trivialised and monumental. Human beings are reduced to anonymous targets—minute, dehumanised points within the crosshairs of military technologies, drones, and missiles—while the spectacle of death is continuously magnified through the immediacy and relentless circulation of social media.
The exhibition evokes both fragmentation and an urgent longing for connection. It unfolds across radically different scales and modes of perception: on one side, the overwhelming apparatus of contemporary warfare, whose remote optics register the human body as little more than a point in vast terrain—a target stripped of identity and presence; on the other, the persistence of storytelling, individual lives, gestures of care, and acts of solidarity. In doing so, the works resist the gradual normalisation of war while acknowledging how difficult such resistance becomes when reality reaches us mediated, fragmented, and increasingly remote.
