kiril kuzmanov » works

Who Controls the Controllers; Or a Record of My Passing By

Kiril Kuzmanov — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 17:20:35 +0000

Dis/Appearance Of The Content 3

Kiril Kuzmanov — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 16:46:50 +0000

Dis/Appearance Of The Content 3
(an explicit object –30 years of implicit suspense)

The Anthropocene, marked with the human influence on climate change and
environmental degradation, correlates human activities and planetary transformation.

Long in making the utopia of production and consumption, abounds materialisation of
concepts and thoughts; fears and expectations of personal status; manifestation of power
through the control over the appearance and disappearance of contents.

Being visible means; being under control. Are the objects of ideas free from control only
when they are not materialised?

Kiril Kuzmanov, Nov 2019

^ 200x500x100cm gondola shelf
with incorporated slow hollow-shaft rotary actuator

Ice-cream and Aviation

Kiril Kuzmanov — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 17:17:58 +0000

2014-

By happenstance, on the 100th anniversary of the beginning of WWI, I spent an afternoon with Kiro Kirov (87 at the time) searching almost every store in the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv for his favourite ice-cream. After a few hours of driving, looking for a car park, and passing through aisles of multiple shelving units with goods and products, we finally found it; a 500 ml roll of pinkish raspberry and brown chocolate ice cream, lying in a banal translucent plastic box.

A commonly uncommon moment of assigning a desire:
– Considering the subjective aspects of desire, not necessarily a mutual one, rather a relatively different one or, more precisely, a number of various ones for each of us shared within the context of a certain occasion;
– A motion-related event having the potency to stretch our cognisance about the concrete and the potential; the utilitarian and the non-pragmatic; the dreamlike and the actual; the physical, virtual, and augmented realities.

What is it, I thought, that provoked Nancy M. Johnson to invent and patent the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer in 1843 – an invention that is still in use today? It was a historical shake-up related to the control of the state of water and matter in untypical geographical and atmospheric conditions.

Shortly after we caught the ice-cream, I found myself at his one-bedroom apartment, located in a rundown part of the city. The living room functioned as a permanent ‘exhibition’ space – two tables, a sofa, handmade shelves – all covered with hundreds of 1:100 scale model wooden airplanes, referring to different historical periods and parts of the world. The bedroom, his actual workshop, was characterised by a single bed with a nearby handmade small working desk under a relatively large two-section window; an organised chaos of tools, materials, and scale drawings of aeroplanes, helicopters and boxes containing their hand-made parts. Following the introduction of his working-living place, on the way to the kitchen, Kiro had a short ‘chat’ with several spiders referring to them as his friends who protected the house from flies. We ate ice-cream, drank low-alcohol beer and told each other stories until after midnight.

His and my peculiar curiosity imperceptibly leapt our conversation towards the space encompassing ice-cream of various types and quality as well as distinctive interconnections within aviation’s past and present. His first personal encounter with aviation was at the beginning of WW2. He and his friends would play by pushing around a small postal plane that made an emergency landing in the fields close to the Radomir railway station.

In early 1945, in light of the 1914 alcohol ban on its ships, the US Navy started introducing ice-cream and commissioned the world’s first floating- ice-cream-parlour for service in the Western Pacific. The parlor was a refrigerated concrete barge, built at the cost of over one million dollars, with the capabilities of producing 37 litres of ice cream every seven seconds. Simultaneously, sugar shortages prompted a propaganda campaign, encouraging children not to eat ice-cream.

In 1945, right after the end of WW2, a giant balloon, filled with helium and shaped like a giant ice-cream cone, the biggest in the world at that time, was displayed in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in New York City.

After showing me a box full of his leftover ice- cream sticks (he was making some of the model’s parts out of them), Kiro told me how his collection started. While landing after flying with a hand glider, Kirov broke his arm. The incident left him grounded for a while, and during this period he began making wooden models of all the aircraft types he had piloted.

What struck me the most during our first meeting was the poetic self-assertion expressed in every aspect of Kiro’s practice. He had a distinct language, both visual and performative, through which he expressed his obsession with flying: here aviation was an intensely personal world, an entire aesthetic, existing in parallel with the four subsequent socio-cultural periods in Bulgarian history – before, during, and after WW2, the establishment of the Communist regime, and the period immediately after the end of the Cold War.

Apart from the different topics and stories we tackled at one point or another in a number of conversations, he shared his dream to have one last solo parachute jump. We started working on it right away and eventually, considering his age, the only option possible turned out to be a tandem jump.

In August 2014, we took a three-hour train trip from Sofia to a small airport near the town of Boychinovtzi. On the next day, we boarded a 35-year-old An-2 airplane. At 3000 m altitude, Kiro jumped and immediately vanished into the air. For a while, I watched and contemplated, harnessed securely, through the open door of the airplane. As the plane spiralled downward, preparing for landing, I saw its shadow slide over the ground and the clouds – then suddenly a bright rainbow encircled the shadow: it was the first time I was witnessing what was known as Broken Spectre.

At the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution in the 1780’s the German Lutheran pastor and natural scientist Johann Silberschlag, who frequented the Harz Mountains, observed and made the first known description of the ‘Broken Spectre’. Not long after Silberschlag’s observation of this natural phenomenon though, the development of manned and unmanned modern balloons and aircraft began to expose their spectres and change the perspective of experiencing the same particular phenomenon.

The first recorded manned flight in modern times was made on 21st of November 1783 in a hot air balloon built by the Montgolfier Brothers. Later, in 1784, in a modified version of the first balloon, they took off from Paris. The balloon flew north at an altitude close to 3,000 metres, above the clouds, travelling a distance of 52 km in 45 minutes. The first recorded use of such a device from aboard a ship occurred in 1806, almost 100 years before the Wright Brother’s powered flight at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. In parallel, Alexander Graham Bell conducted that extravagant, for their time, experiments with unmanned kites and tetrahedral airplanes.

On 22nd August 1849, while Austrian forces blockaded Venice, Austria used about 200 unmanned balloons each one carrying 33 pounds of explosives with half-hour time fuses, which were launched into Venice on that particular day.

Further development of the aviation, during the Industrial Revolution, reversed the experience of the physicality of the space from those being aloft to those on the ground. The pre-industrial concepts of flying were often imagined as a prosthetic extension of the body that aesthetically and functionally could fulfill the gap between desire and ability.

One of the first clashes between dreams and abilities that I experienced was when I was 6. I shared with one of my schoolmates the idea of jumping from the top of the large and tall wardrobe in his home dressed in a white plastic shopping bag, which was supposed to serve as a ‘parachute’. Besides the joy and excitement from the feeling of the blown-up/expanded ‘parachute’, I ended up with my left arm broken. Shortly after I started making gliders.

On the way back from the airport near Boychinovtzi he told me about his own wingsuit – the first such device in Bulgaria, designed and made by him using basic military tarpaulin. He had a dozen jumps in the mid-50s in this suit, and he got excited about the idea of reconstructing it within the frame of the project.

Franz Reichelt was an Austrian-born French inventor who made a living as a tailor but spent most of his time working on a flying parachute suit, designed to be worn by airplane pilots. When Reichelt was working on his design the airplane was still a relatively new invention, and the ways in which a pilot could escape a damaged plane were still being worked out. For instance, during WWI the average life of British pilots was 11 days. Reichelt’s first tests were with dummies and were successful enough for him to test the suit himself. On February 4, 1912, a large crowd gathered at the foot of the Eiffel Tower to witness the historic test. To capture the jump, a cameraman climbed the Tower with Reichelt. The 187-foot fall from the lower level of the tower killed the “flying tailor” instantly. Technology as “useful knowledge” is still widely controversial. Emotional experience of something, predominantly associated with visual language, reveals psychological perspective, which progressively depends on technology and strongly deviates the process of communication. Hence, does Technology present understanding of events? Does particular information, sent and received through Technology, represent the actual?

As the technologies related to military aviation developed, the images began representing less and less the record of a particular event and started capitalising on them.

Photography/moving images and aviation developed alongside each other. They occurred as products of late 19th-century technology and imagination. Aviation films have been used to create a colonial, totalitarian and national image and to promote technological achievement and socio-political endeavours.

In the first decades of the 20th century, American flight schools admitted neither women nor African- or Native Americans. Such a context provoked Bessie Coleman from Chicago to go to Paris on 20th November 1920 and to become the first woman of both African and Native American descent to hold a pilot’s license.

The development of aviation between the Wars and its contribution to the rise of Italian fascism was led by Gabriele D’Annunzio. In 1933, Chicago became the scene of a show ‘performed’ by D’Annunzio’s ideological pal Italo Balbo (who later died in a plane crash in Libya) and his armada of 24 seaplanes – a visit that created a media stir in the United States.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry pioneered international postal flights and surveyed new routes connecting South America, Africa and Europe. His 1935 aeroplane crash in the Sahara Desert was captured in a well-known photograph. Later, Saint-Exupéry reflected on the joy of survival, the Bedouins who discovered and saved him and the strength he drew from his deliverance:

Every doctrine swears that it can breed men, but none can tell us in advance what sort of men it will breed. Men are not cattle to be fattened for market. In the scales of life, an indigent Newton weighs more than a parcel of prosperous nonentities. All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming —a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery, we remembered even the misery with tenderness.

The imaginable in dreams is symbolic, but the perceptions of wakefulness have a symbolic import that in certain ways are essential for the perception to have any sense.

One of the enthralling aspects of movie cameras capturing images is that they can create a slow or, more precisely, extended time-space experience in which the spectator’s perception is naturally distinguished. Here, the role of the spectator can affect the way we are involved, or invited to act, on the distant others.

I thought Kiro had never been interested in aircraft as machines, but as means for being aloft and experiencing the physicality of space. He never produced unmanned aircraft for his collection. But he has made a model of a Japanese aéroplane-bomb1 – a one-way manned flying machine. For the project’s purposes, I provided him with a set of technical drawings and commissioned two military drones2, in 1:20 scale, something that was not part of his collection until that moment.

On November 8th, 1898, Tesla obtained a patent for the remote control, for which he had applied four months earlier on July 1st. Not long after, in 1916, The Bug will appear. And in the late 1930s, the Radioplane Company developed a series of radio-controlled model airplanes as aerial targets for training by the US Army Air Corps. Unmanned aircraft systems were developed simultaneously. In the 40s German airplane crew members would learn to control the Henschel Hs 293 guided bomb in a simulator.

By the WW2’s end in 1945, California’s Radioplane Company produced almost 15,000 radio-controlled “drones” (UAV).

Ever since that time the human eye has been becoming less insignificant. The Earth and Space Surveillance, as a materialized high-tech Panopticon, no matter where we are, impacts us and our surroundings.

There is now a development of the blueprint and the expenditure of military and civil aircraft (the overlapping of the drought zones – aridity isohyets line – and the most drone-monitored and targeted areas in the world, for instance); government and corporate surveillance and space programs on one hand, and the individual practices and personal experience of people, who are radically pushing the boundaries of being aloft, like Kiro Kirov’s life and activities, on the other.

What fascinates me the most is the shift in the concept of being aloft. In the past, that was a form of imaginary experience for the firmly grounded humanity. On the cusp of and throughout the first industrial revolution, the obsession with the construction of a flying apparatus as a prosthetic extension of the body provided the new and until then un-experienced condition of being in the air. Nowadays, at any given moment, approximately one million people are aloft. The commercial flights are no longer providers of flying experience. Over the past century, the very experience of flying has shifted once again – from those in the air to those on the ground. The virtuality of the experience is no longer the result of our dreamy imagination, but rather a sub-product of the machine representation of a relatively simultaneous or past event.

Kiril Kuzmanov, 2014-2017

* Kiro Kirov was born in Radomir, Bulgaria, in 1927. He was a member of the National parachute jumping team, with which he won many international and world championships. After WWII, he became a central figure in parachuting in Bulgaria designing the first wing-suit in the country in the mid-1950s. He started his collection in the early 1980s, creating first models of the aircraft he had flown on, and since then reproduced a significant number (close to 500) of models from aviation history.

Foot Notes:
1. Yakosuka MXY7 OHAK
2. Aerial Targets (1917) and The MQ-1 Predator (1995-)

Abbreviations:
RPA Remotely Piloted Aircraft
UAS Unmanned Aircraft System
GSD Ground Sample Distance

PDF of The Text

What is passing through me, I pass through it (2009-)

Kiril Kuzmanov — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:22:12 +0000

Related works:
Untameable is the Wind

Is the title of the exhibition, a warning coming from ‘37 Bedford square’; is the Georgian building talking to us? Is it reminding us it will out-stand us? Or perhaps merely reminiscing about the many people who have walked under its roof, climbed its stairs, passed its walls, walked on its grounds, those who will remember it forever more.Context is being challenged; is the building containing us or are we containing the building?We pass through two seemingly disparate scenes: an image of the building holding us, a solid interior on the south wall that in its self-reflexivity renews the challenge of context, and facing it on the north wall, a lightweight house, an outdoor house; a tree house. On the one side, an interior devoid of people yet familiarly holding us, the spectators, and on the other side a house only recognisable by the people it holds. One Georgian, one of present-day Gujarat; One standing for over two hundred years, one being replaced repeatedly since way before that.Is there a point where these two remote spaces connect, relate, draw close? To find the answer, I’d like to go back to the title; where the displacement of context suggested is made possible through passing. The title seems to suggest that the possible collision can only be evident in time and in relation to context. Of course, one possible collision is the present, where the Georgian building has become the context of the tree house, the other perhaps Georgian British India where the skies and grounds of the tree house were context.By Rojia Forouhar Abadeh for the presentation of the work in a solo exhibition at:
AA Photo Library Gallery
Architectural Association London
1/10/2015 – 18/12/2015

What is passing through me, I pass through it (2009-), is an instalment of an ongoing project, Untameable is the Wind, initiated by Kiril Kuzmanov in 2008, the first part of which came to a close in April 2010: an eleven-month journey on land, passing through remote areas in Turkey, Kyrgyz Republic, Republic of Kazakhstan, Russian Federation, Altai Republic, Mongolia, China, Tibet, Nepal, Kingdom Lo Mantang, India and Kashmir.

Boredom: Chapter 36/50 (2013-)

Kiril Kuzmanov — Sun, 04 May 2014 12:39:54 +0000

Chapter 36/50 (Backbone) is a part of Boredom (2013-); a video work in progress, dedicated to The Pale King (2011) novel written by David Foster Wallace (1962 – 2008).

DSMC, 16:9, sound, 00:36:30

Chapter 36/50 is realised with the participation of Trevor Tweeten.

The work has been presented in the frame of as a solo exhibition at ICA-Sofia, October 1st – November 8th, 2014. Notably, for the exhibition, the first Bulgarian translation of the text was made by Vladimir Poleganov.

(dis)appearance of the content 2

Kiril Kuzmanov — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 09:17:03 +0000

| (Dis)appearance of the Content 1 | Reviews |

The work has been realised in-between the space of two municipality run institutions – Sofia Art Gallery and the Women’s Market (right before its demolition and redevelopment) – mainly through the exchange of the predetermined workplace, but not the actives, of several institutions’ associated employees or professionals.

Location: Sofia Art Gallery

A stall from the Women’s Market with fruit and vegetable
Documentary Object (plywood, pigment print on paper, marker)
Maya Angelova (self-producing and distributing farmer) – a total of six working days in the gallery

Location: Women’s Market:

A Rolling Object (240/300/60) associated with both locations (plywood, digital print on vinyl 2×225 / 300 cm.,
2×225 / 600 cm, marker, four wheels);
Five folding chairs with a stand (plywood, vinyl) inventory and catalogues with the gallery departments full collection of works
Vladiya Mihaylova, Daniela Radeva and Stanislava Nikolov (Sofia Art Gallery curators of various departments) – a total six
working days at the market

1. Administrative centre of Sofia
2. Sofia Art Gallery
3. The retailer
4. Woman’s Market, Sofia
5. The curators’ location
6. Rolling object associated with both sites

The demolition of the Women’s Market, August 2014

untitled object

Kiril Kuzmanov — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:51:46 +0000

Аn object at the entrance of the exhibition space; industrial textile rubber band,
moving opposite to the direction of entry, 4.5. km per hour, steel elements,
electronic motor with reducer plywood; installation view, Sofia Art Gallery

EXHALE (2008-2011)

Kiril Kuzmanov — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:50:14 +0000

Related works:
Personal Object, 2004

installation view from Raiko Aleksiev Gallery, Sofia, BG
a centrifugal fan 140/90/70cm,
which injects air stream in the empty
gallery space (1100/1400/650) with
250k/h through a hole in the wall (12cm)

Three Seconds Later

xaio — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:45:19 +0000

Three Seconds Later is a work that while using movement/passage through the urban space is emitting back into that same space captured voices, sounds and noises with a three-seconds delay.

Thus it deconstructs the ostensible structure produced by the voice-sound auto affect while demonstrating that it is incompatible with the opportune movement through the same space.

May 2011

Within ‘Art of Urban intervention: Transformation Spots’, project by < rotor > association for contemporary art, Graz; University of J. E. Purkyne, Usti nad Labem; [BLOK] – Local base for cultural refreshment, Zagreb; The Blue House Foundation, Amsterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia and NABA – New Academy of Fine Arts, Milano.

“The thematic of this project is a natural continuation of the ICA–Sofia activities in relation to the Visual Seminar project, organised between 2003 and 2006. It will be engaged with the issues of gentrification (visual and otherwise); in exploring the stages of the introduction of neo-capitalism and the construction of a new urban class of consumers through visual and other material markers in our city and society; in the shifting role of the artists and intellectual in the public debate; in exploring the urban specifics of the existence of (usually) invisible and underprivileged minorities.”

For forward information:
Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia

Below the Traffic

Kiril Kuzmanov — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:00:06 +0000

Below the Traffic 2
Vladaiya River/Canal, June 1, 2013, Sofia

Below the Traffic 1
Perlovska River/Canal, June 3, 2011, Sofia

(1) Perlovetz River/Canal, (2) Start, (3) Final, (4) ‘Evlogi and Hristo Georgiev’ Boulevard, (5) ‘Professor Frityov Nansen’ Str.
(6)’Yanko Sakazov’ Boulevard, (7) Sofia, Bulgaria, (8) Still from video work by Kiril Kuzmanov

Below the Traffic is an initiative by Kiril Kuzmanov
accomplished in Perlovska River/Canal jointly with:
Aleksandar Daniel, Asen Emilov, Liubomir Draganov,
Mina’ Minov, Hristo Stankushev, Todor Stoyanov

Below the Traffic 1
Perlovska River/Canal, June 3, 2011, Sofia
Two channel synchronised video installation: HD 1920×1080,
no sound, one shut 90:00′, loop, variable dimensions
Cinematography and installation, Kiril Kuzmanov

Installation view from the exhibition Reactions,
curated by Vladiya Mihaiylova, Vaska Emanouilova Gallery,
branch of Sofia City Art Gallery, BG

Who Controls the Controllers

Kiril Kuzmanov — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:32:11 +0000

Still image from video documentation, NTSC, 4:3, sound, 00:03:19
Bicycle, a megaphone that is repeatedly emitting in Mandarin: Shei-lai Koíngzhi Koíngzizhe (Who Controls the Controllers)
Chang’an Avenue, Beijing, China (2009-2011)

Who Controls the Controllers is a part of an ongoing project “Untameable is the Wind”, which was initiated in 2008, and the first part of which came to a close in April 2010; an eleven month journey on land, passing through remote areas in Turkey, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, the Altai Republic, Mongolia, China, Tibet, Nepal, the Lo Mantang Kingdom, India, and Kashmir.

Related works:

Untameable is the Wind

What is passing through me,
I pass through it

3 (7) 4

Kiril Kuzmanov — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 17:31:06 +0000

The mix-media installation 3/7/4 (2009-2010) leads back to a concrete situation: at his final examination, Kiril Kuzmanov wrote words on the wooden floor in the examination hall with a water-sucked cloth, which very soon evaporated. This poetical-political act as comment on institutionalization of a certain aesthetical language at the academia the was both non-discursive and self-contained, for this reason irritating. 3/7/4 consists of a wooden showcase, photographs – fragments of the hall as well as a hand-written text – the evaporated draft. 3/7/4 is an archive,at the same time an aesthetic consideration as to question of materiality – and thus it continues to think the conceptual setting in the examinationís hall. Whereas concept artists in the 70s were writing down their concepts into legal contracts and thus materialising it, Kiril Kuzmanov creates an aesthetic documentation- a further expression in space using material, as Stanislav Pamukchiev describes the original work.

Viktoria Draganova

FEEDER (DEAD) HEAD

Kiril Kuzmanov — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:22:11 +0000

The process of metal casting involves the creation of additional spaces in the mould. The material poured into them slows down the curing and crystallisation processes to obtain a casting which is uniform and free from defects. The bits in these extra spaces of the already cooled piece are called feeder heads and are normally removed from the end product, then melted again. Hence a feeder head is an unnecessary remnant of the primary shape of a piece, unfit for economic or cultural use. It is a surplus, consumption of material and energy needed in the production process only.

In Kiril Kuzmanov’s work ‘Feeder head’ is a main object, but also a conceptual framework for presentation of the process and its perception. The artist uses found feeder heads, a sculptural object, video, sound, text, violates the architectural integrity of the gallery space and changes it to build an overall environment in which to present the process of metal casting and involve the viewer directly.

In his work ‘Feeder head’ (2008-2010) the artist explores the idea of the fragment as something opposite to the product (and the artwork as a product). Feeder head is a fragment a piece of matter, an indefinite form which has suffered visible defects in the process of cooling of the metal.

PROJECT 0 (04/2010 – 06/2014)

Kiril Kuzmanov — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:01:48 +0000

Timeline:

Project 0 is an idea for a project generated by the space itself and by the people who inhabit it.
Project 0 is an imaginary filter for passing images, concepts, and meanings.
Project 0 aims to re-activate the public imagination about the space by exploring and non-intrusively commenting on urban space, on stereotypes about living and dwelling, and on whether these make a neighbourhood visible or invisible.
Project 0 is a “non-object,” “nonmaterial” filter composed of fragments with no remainder.

The implementation of Project 0 is closely tied to the process of setting up a platform for generating content and dialogue. It aims at enhancing the range of possible subjects and issues by including all involved in the project – partners, groups and individuals who have placed an order for a fragment, the inhabitants of Zlatarska Street in the Kapana (The Trap) Quarter, those who are interested in the project, as well as people from different disciplines etc. The development of the platform closely follows the process of how the fragments are being stated, creating a critical and public environment for its realization and understanding of the place.

The 50 fragments of the project are forming a bilateral mirror wall, which perpendicularly intersects Zlatarska Street in Plovdiv’s quarter Kapana (The Trap). The fragments precisely follow the outline of the building facades on both sides of the street. Each of the two sides is composed of 25 fragments – 12 of which are 204×102 cm and 13 pieces with variable dimensions, 50 fragments altogether with an individual number and position. The fragments contain the proportional amount of the materials used while their value is calculated based on the expenses for crafting, assembling and dismantling, with no other added value. In the fixed period: June 2010 – May 2013 these fragments were stated by different people and groups and were consequently installed for a period of 10 days (7-17 of June 2014) on Zlatarska Street. After their dismantling, each person or group received their respective fragment, and the project continues to exist in different parts of the world, referring back to the place and the generated process.

Kiril Kuzmanov, 2010

the answer of all questions

Kiril Kuzmanov — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:37:11 +0000

:video, NTSC, 4:3, sound, 0:30, loop

Topology of Transition (Yana Yazova)

Kiril Kuzmanov — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:11:41 +0000

>> digital card of an arch-matl-based proc-gen object, 2008

SWITCHED REALITY

Kiril Kuzmanov — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:49:43 +0000

We live in a reality that more and more vividly reveals the fragmentary essence of our perception of the world.

A conditional fragment of an ‘imagery’ space is switched by a moving digital image –a record of reality.

Are the fragments through which we perceive the present an outset to our perception of what is beyond our present?

>>
A video of a wave is played on the screen –it crashes on the Black Sea shore just in front of a person that overlaps the one painted by Udo.

An obscure sound system disperses sounds–procedurally determined by the spatial location of the people interacting with the work/space–from the roaring North Sea and envelopes the whole gallery space.

In augmented overlap, the sound, the painted figure from Normandy, and the video generate a switch in-between geographic places, ‘realities’, media, and time, subjectively converging in the peoples’ minds.

Kiril Kuzmanov, May 2008

The work comprises:

An emptied museum hall.
“Seascape from Normandy”, oil on canvas, Rolan Udo 1897-1981, painting from the collection of The National Gallery of Foreign Art, Sofia, BG.
Three seconds video on an 86x56mm video screen bound to a 4mm plexiglass sheet set at a 12 cm distance from the painting.
A sound (noise) from the North Sea (passes through the entire gallery space) is generatively determined by the location of the people interacting with the work.

By Kiril Kuzmanov
Camera: Lubomir Draganov
Sound mastering: Todor Stoyanov

Untameable is the Wind

Kiril Kuzmanov — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:02:19 +0000

Untameable is the Wind is an ongoing project, initiated back in 2008, the first part of which came to a close on 15.04.2010; an eleven month route made by land, passing through remote areas of Turkey, Kyrgyz Republic, Republic of Kazakhstan, Russian Federation, Altai Republic, Mongolia, China, Tibet, Nepal, Kingdom Lo Mantang, India and Kashmir.

FOR DOCUMENTARY FRAGMENTS

Kiril Kuzmanov — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:32:54 +0000

1. 23:59 pm

2. To find letter E in London

3. North Sea – negative

: digital print on canvas

: all 35/50 cm

4. Just lost in space

: digital print on canvas

: 147/220 cm

Personal Object

Kiril Kuzmanov — Fri, 02 Jan 2004 23:18:32 +0000

plywood, air coming out of thin hole after being compressed through textile mech.
60x80x30 cm, 2004

IMPRINT

Kiril Kuzmanov — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 19:26:37 +0000

three industrial fragments
wood, precipitate obtained in stone processing industry,
330, 430, 10 cm
photography Asen Emilov

Desolated Habitats; Spatial Act For No Audience

Kiril Kuzmanov — Sat, 05 Oct 1996 13:12:53 +0000

>> two archival images, 1996
>> digitised 35mm black and white film
>> image: courtesy of the artist

Imaginable City Waterfall

Kiril Kuzmanov — Tue, 10 Oct 1995 07:02:48 +0000

Silver gelatine process, 6/9 cm, 1995