“Krasimira Butseva’s practice explores and investigates the history, memory, trauma and political violence in relation to Eastern European communism. She is a multi-disciplinary artist who employs various media – photography, collage, film, found objects, archives, and installation. Regardless of the topic that her work deals with, ultimately, she provides a meta-commentary on the very medium of photography. The artist challenges the democratising qualities of photography and the digital image, by demonstrating the incapability and failure in providing objective representations. It is precisely the democratic nature in the dissemination of images that moves the photographic image from the realms of aesthetics to that of human interaction and thus politics. Krasimira Butseva uses these notions to employ and actively manipulate or emulate the appearance of archival and found images, thus fooling the viewer and emphasising the subjective nature of the medium.

Within the context of the curatorial programme Process Anatomy, Krasimira Butseva’s practice demonstrates the artist taking on the role of a social scientist – historian, anthropologist or sociologist. History is told through objects and images and the artist is an active agent in their collection, curation and preservation. The process of archiving involves active selection that is based on a story that the institution or entity is seeking to tell. In the current exhibition, Krasimira Butseva challenges the role of cultural and political institutions and their active negligence in critically examining the problematic past of the communist regime in the ongoing period of transition. Thus, metaphorically, the images presented are also in transition, incomplete, glitched, and distorted – existing in a liminal space between conflict and resolution, between fragmentation and completeness.”

text by Vasil Vladimirov