Upcoming Exhibition "Standing Voices" at the Cube Gallery - Toplotsentrala on the Occasion of the 20th anniversary of the State Institute for Culture
"The exhibition "Standing Voices" takes place in the context of the conflictual present and the crises of modernity. It returns to basic concepts and primary rights, as well as to irrevocable realities necessary for life itself: the need for water, air, food, for security and protection, but also for connection with others, for freedom, for joy and love," commented Vladiya Mihaylova, curator of the project and programmer of the Cube Gallery at the Regional Center for Contemporary Arts Toplocentrala.
The core of the exhibition is built around stories of public and environmental committees and movements in Bulgaria at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, which represent forms of spontaneous and public civic association and embody the will for rights, freedom, and the value of human life. At the heart of these processes are the protests of the citizens of Ruse against the chemical factory "Verachim" in the Romanian city of Giurgiu, which after its construction in 1981, began to emit chlorine gas, creating a critical and life-threatening crisis for the residents of the city. Mothers with strollers and citizens of Ruse took to the square with calls for a future, for a tomorrow for their children.
From the perspective of the present, the exhibition reexamines Václav Havel’s concept of “living in truth”, placing questions about life as political and ethical existence at its center, along with the voices that emerge as positions and rights. These are voices—bodies that overcome silence and express the will to breathe and to exist with dignity.
The stories from the past resonate together with the voices of the present, in the sense of loss of rights and meaning, as well as in anxieties about the future, where more zones of emergency, exclusion, and death are opening up.
The exhibition also addresses the ecological scale of contemporary living—water, air, the planet, species, and bodies beyond the human. Some of the artworks are interventions into the space of the National Museum "Earth and Man" symbolically and metaphorically exploring the idea of the irreversible impact of the human world on nature.
Events:
14.05.
18:00 - 20:00 - Film screening and conversation with Oliver Ressler
At: National Museum "Earth and Man"
17.05. European Night of the Museums
Cube Gallery is open until 23:00
18:00 - 20:00 - Thinking-in-Assembly "When Thinking Was Done with the Lungs..."
Initiated by Snejanka Mihaylova
At: Cube Gallery - Toplocentrala
31.05.
15:00 - 17:00 - Lecture and conversation with Ovidiu Țichindeleanu
At: Hall 4 - Toplocentrala
18:00 - 19:00 - Curatorial Tour with Vladiya Mihaylova at the Cube Gallery – Toplocentrala and the National Museum "Earth and Man"
The event is realized with the support of Bulgarian Telegraph Agency - main media partner.