Online view at Blinkvideo.de
This work is part of a series of videos that are shot in different buildings around the world. The basic idea is to make a kind of night portrait of buildings using unusual dynamic lighting of various internal spaces. Rooms in the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia are full of stuffed animals and insects, fossils in which, by their very nature, matter stands still in terms of time. This context gives additional meaning to the light as an agent of ‘revival'.
'Samuil Stoyanov's site-specific space portraits series started with the Geocidite building in Belgrade where the 53rd October Salon took place in 2012. To study these modernist spaces of display and presentation, the artist first destabilises the light, the fixed element of every space as such. Through these portraits every building he interacts with becomes a part of Stoyanov's artistic cosmos. In a gesture of hurling a light bulb above his head making the largest possible circle, Stoyanov, in his own words, makes reference to the spatial movement of the objects in the universe. Here the figure of the artist appears not only as a pseudo-scientist conducting inventive experiments but also as a black hole holding all the centrifugal movement in an orbit around him. The artist chose the Natural Museum of History in Sofia as the venue for his first such experiment with a site-specific portrait in Bulgaria as the museum is a classic display location for geological history.'
Text: Ovul Durmusoglu (Turkey, Germany)
Credits
Camera: Rayna Teneva
Video and audio editing: Stanislav Kolev and Samuil Stoyanov.
Filmed in the National Museum of Natural History, Sofia, Bulgaria