Luchezar Boyadjiev
Crawling Carpets
Solo Exhibition
EAF (Experimental Art Foundation), Adelaide, Australia, 2006
(curator Melentie Pandilovski)

Luchezar Boyadjiev, Crawling Carpets

"Istanbul: Visual Operative / Crawling Carpets", 2005 is a double screen work made during the artist's stay in Istanbul, a city on the border between West and East, straddling two continents. The artist assumes the persona of an 'operative' gathering data on behalf of the European Union, in this still exotic, but changing city.
His mission is to evaluate the visual environment of Istanbul ahead of Turkey's negotiating process for accession to the EU. Always on the alert for visual irregularities, the operative shows us images of familiar landmarks, Westernised shops, and street bazaars, set to a voiceover which conveys the operative's findings. Boyadjiev is addressing the different cultural expectations and attitudes that lie at the heart of the difficult relationship between Europe and Asia. The artist suggests, with dead-pan irony, that perhaps Turkey should be integrated into the EU in three stages, gradually and progressively extending Europe's standards and systems ever Eastwards.

Luchezar Boyadjiev was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and trained as an art historian and theorist. He has been working as an artist but started exhibiting only after 1989. He was the founding member of the Sofia Institute of Contemporary Art and has exhibited and lectured internationally, including 'After the Wall' (Moderna, Stockholm), 'Temp-Balkania' (Kiasma, Helsinki), 'Revolting' (Manchester), 'Money/Nations' (Zurich), and 'Hybrid Workspace', documenta X (Kassell). In 2006 he will be exhibiting in the Singapore Biennale.