A repetitive shrieking enticed viewers into Seduced and Intrigued: New Media from Bulgaria, curated by Biliana Velkova, Barbara Prokop and Naomi Potter of the Montreal-based BLUNT Collective. As the reciprocal part of an exchange project between Canada and Bulgaria developed by BLUNT, Seduced and Intrigued presented the works of four Bulgarian media artists: Boriana Dragoeva, Kossio Minchev, Ivan Nikolov, and Krassimir Terziev. BLUNT's curatorial investigation focuses on the "complications and implications distance adds to media based work"; distance - physical, experiential, cultural and ideological - complexifies the reading of these artists' works coming out of what is perhaps the least known of the Eastern European bloc countries. Eliding the problematics of a language barrier, the curators selected work in which speaking is absent (with the exception of excerpts in English on a CD ROM compilation); instead mediated screaming and electronic music are the mode of aural address.
Projected onto two oversized pillow-like screens, Krassimir Terziev's sequences of Hollywood-horror female hysteria in Dreaming
Your Nightmares, set a disturbing tone for the show. The dominating audio was inescapable even when donning headphones to
engage with the other works. An informal panel discussion at the Khyber Club addressed Terziev's ambiguous level of critical
engagement in his employment of the sensationalized sexualized female body with such implications of violence. The work also
resonates within the context of Bulgaria's 1991 "velvet revolution" and more recent transition to a market economy, commenting
on the imposing influx of American culture to a country long repressed under a State government and sealed off from the West.
The female hysterical body also engaged viewers in Boriana Dragoeva's, The Thing I Had to Do. Two women, eyes and mouths wide
with parody, stare at an assumed off-screen source of terror. A heavy edit technologically ruptures the body and voice,
producing a staccato inarticulateness. Their hands clamp one another's mouths to stifle fragmented digital noise, intimately
audible through the viewer's headphones. Approaching the humourous, yet veering equally towards the disturbing, the work
manifests a moving beyond language, or regression, historically associated with the female hysteric.
The implications of distance further complicated Seduced and Intrigued resulting in a modified presentation of the intended works: the delayed arrival of Ivan Nikolov's Bedroom was remedied by showing Video Verité (19 Canadian videos curated by BLUNT which was the Canadian contribution to the exchange, screened in Bulgaria in 1999), and the CD ROM compilation (a selection of works produced by various artists at Interspace-Media Art Centre in Sofia) was actually a band-aid solution to the inaccessibility of Petko Dourmana's web-based piece. This accounts for their somewhat incongruous fit, yet appropriately, if not inadvertently, still reflects BLUNT's curatorial interest.
New media production is relatively young in Bulgaria; the first international video art festival was hosted in 1999, and artists make do with limited technological resources. The 'international accessibility' of new media practice encourages exchanges such as this one undertaken by BLUNT. Engaging with the "complications and implications" of distance BLUNT has presented, we as viewers make our own meanings as work produced in one particular local context is transported to another. Although I feel Seduced and Intrigued presented some interesting work and was a good show overall, what I find most inspiring about this, or any of the other HX and HI events, is the dialogue and motivation sparked within the community. The getting-things-out-there that BLUNT has accomplished is inspiring, leaving us with something to think about and get busy on...
© Heather Anderson, 2000
