Critique of Pure Image - Between Fake and Quotation
Ornament
Interactive mixed-media installation, electric light and sound, 2005.
Nadia Genova, born 1960 in Sofia, lives and works in Plovdiv, graduated in graphic art from the Art Academy in Sofia in 1984, participated in residencies in Paris and in Schuol and Boswil, Switzerland. She works as a graphic artist and does objects and installations. She has been awarded prizes for her graphic work at international forums, as well as the prize of the city of Plovdiv for an individual exhibition in 1993. She was a founding member of the first alternative art group “Ryb” (The Edge) in opposition to the official Socialist discourse in the 1980s, one of the artists-activists who obtained the use of the Ancient Baths in Plovdiv for contemporary art events. She is one of the founding members of the women artists’ group “8th March” and has contributed to raising questions in the public space about the position of women in the Bulgarian cultural scene.
“Ornament” is an intervention in public space researching the mechanisms with which advertising or sectarian religious propaganda or the Wheel of Fortune manipulate people’s perception so as to establish in the collective conscience some nonsense as the truth. One of the conditions guaranteeing the impeccable functioning of market mechanisms in every society today is our emotional dependency on what we hear and see, on our immediate perception. Is there a way to escape, to build a cocoon to isolate oneself from the irradiation we are subject to, outside the noise of images, sounds and information that compose our reality? Can we develop criteria of true and untrue, of real and unreal, which would allow us to resist the constant manipulation?