Panel Discussion with the participation of Krassimir Terziev, Vladiya Mihaylova, Kiril Vasilev, Desislava Dimova, Mila Mineva. Moderator Alexander Kiossev
From the documentary footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall to the photos of President Trump in front of the Mexican-American border fence, from the legendary graffiti of the kiss between Honecker and Brezhnev to Banksy’s graffiti on the West Bank Wall—the images on walls, barriers, and borders continue to multiply and never cease to excite the collective imagination.
What are the walls in this almost uncountable visual production—solid security facilities or terrible barriers to freedom? In the first of the three panel discussions at the “Walls” international conference aimed at the general public, we will discuss the topic from the perspective of artists, curators, and art critics.
Photos: Yana Lozeva
Contemporary art prefers to depict them as if all walls were “Berlin” walls—they are there to be destroyed, overcome, mocked, or else are simply an occasion for sympathy and activist engagement with the suffering of refugees and migrants. In popular culture, however, their visual value can be quite different: for example, in Game of Thrones, a stunning Ice Wall stands between “us” and “them,” an obvious symbol of the insurmountable border between human and inhuman. In this popular series, the defense of the Wall is accordingly not seen as policing or hostile surveillance—on the contrary, it is portrayed as heroically holding back the influx of the Monstrous, of wraiths and savages. This ambivalence poses a serious question: how should we think about Walls today? Which images of them dominate, and what are the visual and conceptual conflicts they create? Do they simply reify already existing borders, or just the opposite—do they themselves create them? Are they not, e contrario, signs of rebellion and freedom? In which cases are phantasms born of dreams, and in which are they born of mass fears? Their image is multifarious, contradictory, and ambiguous; it would be difficult list all the possibilities: there are walls that are there simply because they are waiting to be painted, to be turned into works, even into open-air galleries. There are crumbling walls, giving off the strange aesthetic of Ruins; in fact, people today are surrounded by such fragments of former Walls, rising without any function, in the middle of nothingness, telling vague stories of forgotten enmities, meaningless borders, weathered barriers… And there are probably figurative versions of walls that we do not even recall.
As a starting point for the conversation, there will be a discussion of the video documentation of the performance “Let’s Build, Let’s Demolish,” which took place on October 13 at Krassimir Terziev’s installation Between the Past That Is About to Happen and the Future That Has Already Been, at the site of the former communist mausoleum in Sofia (based on an idea by Alexander Kiossev and in collaboration with Vladiya Mihaylova, Krassimir Terziev, and Martin Penev).
In Bulgarian.
Organizers: the Cultural Center of Sofia University, the Center for Reading and Culture, and CCA Toplocentrala, with the support of the America for Bulgaria Foundation