Michail Michailov: There You Are

The exhibition in the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 59th International Venice Biennale is titled There You Are and was conceived by artist Michail Michailov and curator Irina Batkova. 

Commissioner: Iara Boubnova, Director of the National Gallery, Sofia.

Mrs. Iliana Yotova, Vice President of the Republic of Bulgaria, will inaugurate the exhibition at its opening.

The Bulgarian Pavilion is under the patronage of Mrs. Iliana Yotova, Vice President of the Republic of Bulgaria.

The There You Are project explores the Spazio Ravà interior for the possibility of transforming physical space into a symbolic one, reinterpreted in the context of the body and its interaction with its living environment. Following the geometry of the rooms and the architectural and interior features, Michail Michailov arranges the exhibition by building objects similar in shape and proportions to the existing furniture. They create a minimalist but also an absurd stage on which the exhibition narrative unfolds.

Michail Michailov is an artist who, by enlisting the aid of various media (performance, drawings, video, sculpture, installation), creates meditative areas that focus on the not-so-visible aspects of human existence. The process of designing each exhibition includes transforming  a specific place into a zone of thought structures that stimulate the viewer to search for words to define them.

At the core of this project lies a series of drawings, entitled Dust to Dust, on which the artist began work eight years ago. The series tracks the not-so-visible accumulation of everyday human detritus, which symbolically measures time passing in human life. The museum pedestals included in the exhibition, with brushes, broom handles, parts of vacuum cleaners attached to them, maintain a constant tension between presence and absence in the project space. Waste material, drawn with virtuosity and turned into a work of art, and the surreal museum-cleaning pedestals metaphorically construct the constant, lonely search for meaning in the narrative of everyday life.

Michail Michailov wears white medical overalls for his performances, which depersonalise the body, thereby becoming a microelement of the human cycle in a macro universe of birth and death. The idea of endless cyclicality in human existence is embedded in the Just Keep on Going video series, part of which is included in the exhibition. These videos present actions whose meaning lies in the movement itself and not the final result. They capture the artist’s interaction with a fictional dystopian living environment and his constant effort to master it.

In the There You Are project, the pavilion window is obscured by a structure where the observer must place his head in a particular opening to allow a view of the exhibition gallery. That is the Headspacing installation; it separates the body that remains outside from the head, the place where thought fields arise. In this way, the eye falls into the trap of a laboratory environment, examining the deep essential characteristics of things, where the instantaneous analysis provoked by one’s perception can hardly be verbalised.

Michail Michailov became part of his exhibition in the performance at the pavilion’s opening. His view through the Headspacing symbolises the artist’s reflection on the newly created world constructed with imaginary objects. The installation isolates the noisy, urban environment full of sensory challenges It focuses attention on a single possible view, where the immediate image is replaced by one that is the fruit of the work of consciousness. This gesture is at the core of the phenomenological bridge that allows us to transcend t­he interpretation of a particular work of art to search for ontological truth at the heart of the impulse to create art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book that includes writings by: Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michail Michailov and Irina Batkova. Its content is based on a mixture of curatorial and poetic approach to the essence of the visual objects included in There You Are project. The book is designed by Мagdalina Stancheva - Poststudio.

The Bulgarian Pavilion at the 59th International Venice Biennale is funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria and organized by the National Gallery, Sofia.

Media inquiries 
Gergana Mudova, bulgariavenicebiennale@gmail.com / T +359 892 222365
Cecilia Sandroni, sandroni@italienspr.com / T +39 335 522 5711