Exhibition by Alexandra Chaushova curated by Desislava Dimova
30.04 – 20.06.2025
Opening: April 30, Wednesday, 6:00 p.m.
Vaska Emanuilova Gallery presents a solo exhibition by artist Alexandra Chaushova, curated by Desislava Dimova, as part of the program "Meeting Place". The event is part of the special exhibition program marking the 120th anniversary of Vaska Emanuilova's birth. The exhibition includes a series of drawings and a play script created especially for the exhibition, as well as a documentary video.
The exhibition Romantic Species by artist Alexandra Chaushova is a meditation on the possible images of the female artist, which intertwine the figure of the author with that of the sculptor Vaska Emanuilova across time and geography. In the exquisitely detailed drawings, as well as in the texts of Alexandra Chaushova, the female artist appears as a strange species – she is a mythical animal, an exotic bird, hidden behind a mask, but she is also the author of mysteriously animating sculptures, a builder of monuments to the unfulfilled, a technologist of impossible desires and materials.
The bird is the artist's "totem" animal, through which she experiences her fate as a foreigner. Exotic birds have dominated the human imagination since ancient times, known and sought after both with scientific interest and as a valuable acquisition, part of the conquests in the history of the West. Alexandra Chaushova makes bird drawings "from nature" in the rich collections of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels - the city in which the artist lives and works. The taxidermied exotic bird is a kind of symbol of the attitude towards nature in the modern order, but also of the very social function of art as a means of perpetuation.
The play The Changing Monument continues the narrative of the “romantic species” through a free interpretation of Vaska Emanuilova’s work and fate, mostly through her authorship of figures for monuments, including the dismantled Monument to the Soviet Army. The text is based on documentary sources (some from Vaska Emanuilova’s personal archive), but remains in the realm of pure fiction about an imaginary monument – the antithesis of all monuments: the monument to what has not yet happened. Similar to other previous scenarios, where Alexandra Chaushova interpreted the drawings as costume designs for the play (for example, in Undoing the End of Things from 2015), here too the drawings of bird masks are ideas for scenography, thus connecting both the two artists and two seemingly different narratives and historical moments. In them, everyone and everything can find themselves on a pedestal, as well as leave it later.
The exhibition is being held in partnership with the Bulgarian Art and Culture Foundation and with the assistance of the Sofia Culture Program and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.
