Dear friends and colleagues,
You’re warmly invited to the opening of Artefactual Nature, a joint exhibition by Kalina Dimitrova and Krassimir Terziev, taking place on the evening of Wednesday, May 21.
Vernissage: Wed, 21.05, 6–9 pm
Artist talk: Sat, 24.05, 4 pm
Opening hours: 22-31.05, Wed-Sat, 3-6 pm,
1-3.06 by appointment
Curated by Ottjörg A.C.
The project is realised with the financial support of National Culture Fund of Bulgaria
Roam Projects
Lindenstraße 91
10969 Berlin
Artefactual Nature
The tense relationship at the interface between artifacts, the artifactual, and natural or environmental elements is central to the works of Kalina Dimitrova and Krassimir Terziev. These are the two artists represented in the exhibition Artefactual Nature.
However, they both approach the concept from very different starting points. Terziev sets out from an established and seemingly constant place – the private space of an apartment, firewood, an urban environment or the planet Earth itself. But these familiarities are disrupted. The walls of the private space and the architecture coordinates are undermined by the digital.
The individual is left with nothing but the lookout of an unprotected spaceship in an undefined universe. The firewood retains its external form but loses its calorific value. The routine of everyday life in a city, the Aristotelian efficiency of the outside world, is disrupted and becomes a mystical dysfunctionality. The shadow of a palm tree unexpectedly falls on the planet Earth itself seen from an extraterrestrial viewpoint.
An interplay of human and artificial elegance
In this instance Terziev’s work relates closely to Dimitrova’s as she is not preoccupied at all with pre-sets, artifact or nature morte. In Phantoms II, she takes leftover rhizome. Then, she supplements its lateral shoots and adventitious roots with ones sculpted in acrylic glass. To define these transparent acrylic waves as a “root substitute” would mean to deprive the work of a substantial part of its poetry, emitting frost and fragility at once.
This brittleness and materiality of the acrylic glass reappears elsewhere in the exhibition. And while this is not nature morte, the work is in fact inspired by the vine, drifting poetically into an interplay of human and artificial elegance.
In the work “Bears and other Surfaces” Dimitrova relates closely to Terziev’s work. A small picture in three variations, a bearskin on the wall – does it symbolize the crucified, the forgiving savior, or is it just a decorative foil? Another meeting point of the two artists’ works.
About the Artist:
Kalina Dimitrova (b. 1975, Gabrovo) graduated in Mural Painting from the National Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia (2001).
Her recent solo exhibitions include “Time twisted around a Place, twisted around Time” (with Krassimir Terziev), Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia, 2025; “Tumbleweed”, Site-Specific Installation, Limnos island, Greece, 2024; “Stellar Skins and Phantoms”, Charter Gallery, Sofia, 2023; “Phantoms III”, Collect Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey, 2023; “Phantoms II”, Credo Box, Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia, 2023; “Escapes”, Charter Gallery, Sofia, 2022; “01100011 01101000 01110010 01101001 01110011 01110100 01101101 01100001 01110011″*, +359 Gallery, Sofia, 2020; “Biophilia”, Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia, 2020; “Hidden Life”, Gallery “Gallery”, Sofia, 2020; “Newer and newer waters flow into those that have already flowed into the same rivers”, +359 Gallery, Sofia, 2018.
Krassimir Terziev (b. 1969, Dobrich) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans a diversity of media, including video/film, photography, painting/drawing, and text, questioning the boundaries between reality and fiction, while exploring the manifold transitions and tensions between a globalised world, dominated by overwhelming multiplicity of symbolic imagery, and its material groundings in technological, physical and human ‘hardware’.
Terziev holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology (Sofia University 2012) and an MA in Painting (National Academy of Arts Sofia 1997).
His work is part of the public collections of Centre Pompidou/MNAM, Paris; Arteast 2000+ Collection, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana; Art Collection Telekom, Bonn; Sofia City Art Gallery, Sofia; Kunstsammlung Hypovereinsbank, Munich, among others.
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