Kiril Prashkov
Mind Your Step
Solo Exhibition
Eibank Gallery, Sofia, 2007
Kiril Prashkov, together with Nedko Solakov, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Pravdoliub Ivanov and many others, belongs to the vanguard wave risen some fifteen years ago in Bulgaria by the fall of the communism. However “vanguard” is a deceptive term, as far as it has been derived from the military terminology of the modernism and the abovementioned painters are rather participants in the postmodern desertion from the art front. They fight only with their regional claustrophobia and create export products for the international market of the non-market art. That spontaneously turns the contrast between own and stranger’s into content focus of their groping, where “under condition” the own is touching, provincial, repressive and traumatic.
Almost having the responsibility of Hypocratus’s vow, Kiril Prashkov is the most concentrated in diagnosing the national identity and that is seen in special series called “National style” whose final continuation/quotation is “MIND YOUR STEP” presented in EIBANK Gallery. Most generally speaking he is concerned with the difficulties/obstacles in the globalization of the Bulgarian people and thus reminds of the films of Georgi Mishev.
Prashkov suspects that our identity is held based on the growth of the trivial everyday articles (beans, peppers, wattle fence, etc.) up to worth categories and “national icons”, and to understand it they must be send back in the subject order – ridiculed and humiliated, trampled on, as far as possible literally.
This exhibition, the first one after our accession to European Union, is dedicated to the literal trampling turned into a campaign – Prashkov has printed his works on carpet pieces, precisely hemmed so as to be used on purpose. The cycle is closed. The identity reduction to everyday articles is conceptualized in art which in its turn is reduced to an everyday article. The contrast is now nationally-consumer one and thus it is “dialectically removed” s a result from their turning out to be one and the same thing.
“MIND YOUR STEP”, of course, also participates in easily bigger aesthetic campaign started with the urinal of Dushamp for trampling the very art (the work, the author, the institution, the material). And now it can appear from everywhere, even when you are looking at your legs taking care of not straining them on your way from the living-room to the bathroom or from Sofia to Brussels.
Georgi Lozanov
