Time Geometry - Practices in Public Environment

Art Project Depot - Time Geometry - Practices in Public Environment
18.05 - 31.05.2012
Regional History Museum, Plovdiv

Initiated by HR-Stamenov and Bora Petkova
Artists: HR-Stamenov and DLQ, David Perez Karmadavis, Bora Petkova, Saso Sedlacek, Veronika Tzekova, Miryana Todorova ,Jaroslav Kysa, Michail Michailov, Valentina Roselli
Photo credit: HR-Stamenov

Aiming to shed more light on the experimental use of the public space, in the halls of the museum will be presented video documentations of performances and artistic actions in public space by international artists who are interested mostly in working in an active social environment and in the interactions with people.

The exhibition will examine different artistic positions and practices in the most extensive network of realities that the contemporary society generates by focusing on the identification of these kinds of practices in the public context and their localization within the system of contemporary art. Are they attractive and communicative enough? What is the goal of the artistic interventions? Do they provoke any substantial change into the society?

Without giving any particular answer to all these questions, the exhibition presents different examples of artistic practices which aim to integrate into the everyday life: A strange train appears passing by confined spaces, buildings and shops in an Italian city; In Latin America someone is building the Tower of Babel not from stones, but from real people; A blind Dominican man carries in his arms a Haitian woman without legs; Someone performs a levitation in Berlin's panel neighborhoods; A beggar robot competes with self-service machines in Japan, while in Taipei and Ljubljana it collects alms in the crowded shopping malls in the name of the poor; The paving slabs in Sofia have been used for a play of the “Ludo-game”; Some vague moving forms create bewilderment in New York; A barrier of pigeons stops the traffic on a busy junction in London; An ambiguous thirty meters lettering is faced by visitors of the St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna; Somewhere in Ethiopia a young Italian artist conducts a workshop in new media with a native tribe.

Presented in the spaces of the Regional History Museum – Plovdiv, the show “Time Geometry – Practices in Public Environment” will provide an opportunity for historical continuity that to establish a logical connection between the past and the present. The exhibition emphasizes the mission of the museum to preserve the tangible and the intangible values as evidences of humanity and makes visible the relation of those values to the particular environment and broader social field, where they are developed and which they actively transform.

The exhibition brings in the museum halls not only a new selection of works and documentations, but also rather new objectives and audience. The focus is put on the need for social development of the museum that brings the institution and the artists together, allowing the museums in general to be considered not only as witnesses and guardians of the past but also as adequate platforms and partners in the reflection upon the processes in the contemporary society.