ON VACATION… / ALDONA

Exhibition period: 04.11.2023-10.11.2023, 19:00-21:00

Artists: Luchezar Boyadjiev, Emilija Škarnulytė
Curator: Orestis Mavroudis
Exhibition Coordinator: Despina Krey
Photos: Nikos Katsaros

The exhibition On vacation... / Aldona is a dialogue between Luchezar Boyadjiev's installation On vacation... and Emilija Škarnulytė's film Aldona.
On vacation… is an ongoing series of digitally manipulated photographs in which human figures have been removed from public monuments. The erased subjects are predominantly male political leaders, historical characters, military commanders, and members of royal families, all depicted heroically riding horses. Boyadjiev’s gesture challenges dominant narratives and power structures, opening possibilities for interventions on existing public artworks.
Škarnulytė's film is a portrait of her grandmother’s tactile reconstruction of memories. In the spring of 1986, Aldona lost her vision and became permanently blind. The nerves in her eyes were poisoned. Doctors claimed that it was probably due to Chernobyl’s Nuclear Power Plant explosion. In the film we follow Aldona through a daily sojourn to Grutas Park, touching both the past and the present.

Luchezar Boyadjiev (b. 1957, Sofia, Bulgaria) lives and works in Sofia. He graduated from the Department for Art History at the National Fine Arts Academy in Sofia in 1980. The artist completed his art education while living in New York City, USA in the 1980s. He started on his artistic career after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His work is about personal interpretation of social processes, about the interaction between private and public, about urban visuality and the world of today split between utopia and dystopia. His media is installation, photography, drawing, objects, text, video, and performative lectures. In 2020 his solo show “Luchezar Boyadjiev: Re-building the World of Images. 1991-2019” was seen at MOMus in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987, Vilnius, Lithuania) lives and works nomadically. An artist and filmmaker, Emilija Škarnulytė works primarily with deep time, the realm of extremely slow change. Exploring the problems of our historical era, such as climate change, she tries to look at them from the imaginary perspective of a future archaeologist or geologist. Her works often take place in ecologically unique places: the deserts of the American West or the Middle East, nuclear power plants in Europe, Cold War bases and aphotic (lightless) zones. Camera becomes an archaeological tool that pierces through various layers: cosmical, geological, ecological and political.

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