An Event from The RE-TOUR Series Gathered Connoisseurs Of Contemporary Art at the Mission Gallery
A fruitful conversation about contemporary art and its place and role in society took place on January 14 at the Mission Gallery, where part of the Herbarium collection with Dutch artists can be viewed until January 27. The event was organized by the Cultural Center of Sofia University within the framework of the RE-TOUR initiative and hosted by the State Institute for Culture of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
The curator of the collection Irina Batkova told about the results of the creative experiment "Herbarium". She recalled that the goal is to explore the essence of the creative process in contemporary visual artists of different generations and countries. The RE-TOUR discussant was the art critic and journalist Dr. Evgenia Atanasova-Teneva, who analyzed her personal impressions, impacts and provocations from the project. The conversation was attended by art critics, journalists and students - connoisseurs of contemporary art, as well as representatives of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Bulgaria, who are partners of the project.
The Herbarium collection captures the energy of the creative act of different generations of artists around the world in boxes similar to those in which plant specimens are kept. The boxes are accompanied by author's texts and sound files, as well as additional materials related to the creative biographies of the participants. The collected materials are published and available at https://www.herbariumcollection.com
Part of the "Herbarium" project are the "H Talks" video portraits, which are filmed in the artists' working environment. All elements of the project form a unique archive for researchers, curators, gallerists, students and art connoisseurs interested in the less visible mechanisms at work in contemporary culture. The first exhibition of the "Herbarium" collection took place in 2021 in the Sofia Arsenal - Museum of Contemporary Art. It included 55 authors from Bulgaria, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Japan, Finland, the USA and Turkey.
The new Herbarium edition presented at the Mission Gallery focuses on artists based in the Netherlands. The project features eight new authors in addition to those shown in the previous exhibition. The Dutch Herbarium selection includes the artists Andrea Freckman, Levi van Veluw, Lili Huston-Herterich, Michaela Lakova, Lola Goeller, Nan Wang, Berndnaut Smilde, Funda Baisal, Larissa David, Eden Mitzenmacher, René Beekman, Marie Civikov, Merve Kulcher and Angelica Falkeling.
The curator Irina Batkova and the director of "H Talks" Milena Kaneva documented the meetings with eight artists in their working studios in Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Middelbjerg. In the short films, the visual artists reflect on various aspects of their realization on the artistic scene and touch on very important topics related to the possibility of maintaining your creative independence in a world where daily survival requires more and more strength and energy.
As part of the exhibition, the premiere of the video portraits of Eden Mitzenmacher, Andrea Freckman and Marie Chivikov will take place on January 21, Saturday at 6 pm at the G8 Cinema, 8 Gladstone Street.