TOBACCO WAREHOUSE

The project links together the six locations from the Dark Side of the Night itinerary. While the stories do not follow any particular order, each is related and dependent on the others, and on the instinct of the public to discover and understand them. “The dark side of the soul” is an expression first ascribed to Juan de Yepes y Álvarez (John of the Cross), designating the temporary experience of spiritual desolation in mysticism, a time in which God is concealed and faith seems to waver. Called the “Sahara of the heart” by Richard J. Foster, this is a period when Man “measures his indignity in a downward movement” before measuring “his greatness in a movement up towards Light”. Which is why it is not a negative experience. John of the Cross differentiates between two types of night: one of the senses, and the other of the mind.

The Silent Rock Festival is an electronic music concert that can be heard by one person from the public at a time. Critical of the art tendency to become purely spectacular and event driven, the project deals with the common problem of public/private, the position of art in the “entertainment industry” and the place of the viewer. The purpose of « Silent Rock Festival » is not to present a piece to the public, but to make the “public gathering” the piece in itself. The presentation of a private moment in public context, places the viewer in a spectacle of the spectacle.

The advent of large-scale tobacco production represents a pivotal point in the development of both American history and that of Plovdiv. This large scale print work seeks to explore and celebrate the personal relationship of simultaneous give and take that exists between people who share a cigarette and how this ritual changes from country to country.

If someone picks it up, then that's communication.
Robert Barry

The play is set as a late night TV talk show called «Mapping the night», focused on both intellectual and parapsychological problems . While random ordinary people continue to dream about the Cosmos or even achieve fame by actually entering in contact with it, scientist are faced with a mute outerspace. All authorised calls to the outer world receive no answer, yet some individuals claim to live with the Cosmos here and now. The show's host tries to address this double standard of communication. A medium, an art historian, an ectoplasm of the Bulgarian king Ferdinand, few male scientists in passing, a news reader, an Angel. They will all try to answer some questions. Is the Cosmos setting a new hierarchy of knowledge? Is its silence more meaningful than any possible message, however sublime it might be? In fact, is it the same Cosmos we are all taking about? Find out tonight, at midnight.

Michelle Naismith’s videos create a world that outlines the vague boundaries between real and imagined, eccentricity and madness, between people, animals, archetypes and fantastical beings. Meditative and enigmatic, her works also examine the nature of visual media – image, text, rhythm, light, darkness – elements that make up raw, complex, labyrinthine films. Naismith is capable of achieving an almost hypnotic effect without a trace of illusionism. The props are improvised, the locations – from the artist’s daily life, and the actors – the artist herself and her friends.
Daily life in Naismith’s videos is sad and hopeless, but also majestic and magical. The Poodle – an aristocrat and intellectual – is part Mozart, part Mezmer and part Schopenhauer, and although sick and forgotten, continues to dictate his thoughts to an assistant in his rented panel-block apartment in a French suburb, to the sound of Francois Couperin. The Palace of Justice is turned into a ball room for a giant, lonely promenading black egg. A psychiatric ward is transformed into an art school with a peculiar dietary regime, while the Ministry of Social Affairs attempts to reduce unemployment with hypnosis. Naismith’s eccentric characters transform our institutions into hospitals for the soul, in which there is no cure for melancholy. Melancholy is the cure.

David Bohm (1982) and Jiri Franta (1978) have been collaborating since 2006. They are mainly engaged in drawing, its installation, its performance and related long-term tasks. Their attention is mostly just focused on the process, which is often hindered by various obstacles or constraints, so the process is frequently even more important than the result itself. The event itself can become a spectacular performance, having the primary focus, with the drawing as a byproduct
Bohm and Franta participated in many exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, attended residencies in New York, Berlin and Vienna. They were nominated in 2009, 2010 and 2012 for prestigious Jindrich Chalupecky Award. bohmfranta.net