Curator: Dessislava Dimova
6.03 – 24.03.2024
Little Bird Place Gallery
See all works from the exhibition HERE!
Opening: 6.03.2024 (Wednesday) – 5:30 – 9:00 pm.
I dreamt a dream before embarking on this journey. I was swimming in cold blue water, so blue, as if intentionally dyed, as sometimes happens in dreams. I wasn’t alone; we all swam in this blueness, dense like olive oil, not turbulent, but calm. Ahead of us were cliffs, smooth and the color of baked clay, almost glossy from the footsteps of all those who had reached them before us. Upon awakening, I knew the ultimate goal towards which, blinded by fear and longing, we were striving with each successive stroke.
Reality is different, and the contrast between it and the dream is astonishing. Two weeks of restless daytime sleep in the rumbling bellies of machines and exhausting night journeys, gazing at the endless array of dark ridges that we cannot see during the day – the light is too bright, and we can only speculate about it, cramped in the bellies of the heavy all-terrain vehicles with which we travel to the gardens in the desert.
On the last night, we all struggled to catch a glimpse of the promised white glow when, behind the ridge of one of the mountains, it shone like a nuclear explosion above the night garden. It took us yet another painfully sleepless day to reach it. At dusk, we were greeted by a tall and somber man who, an hour later, led us through his kingdom. The greenhouses were enormous, shining like the bellies of nocturnal insects, and when I entered the first one, I was awestruck. Inside, the base of the transparent walls was covered with creeping plants, predatory and ghostly in the light coming from the floor and ceiling, ominously subdued like guards.
In the middle of the greenhouse, huge begonias, orchids, fuchsias, welwitschias, and liliums grew, adorned with luminous clusters of milky flowers. Plants like lion’s mane, like scraped bones, like dead insects, plants with tough skins, with predatory teeth, with greedy mouths and generous aerial roots, with tendrils of white pearls, with seeds about to burst from suppressed desire, with leaves adorned with thorns and moon spots, formed as if from the semen of an unknown god, graceful and incomparable, indifferent to the desert through which we, the devotees, passed through during a seemingly endless chain of the darkest nights and days humanity has ever dreamed of, only to reach, together, this abstract in its forms and threatening in its size collection. The silence surrounding these solitary giants is damp, torturous, a mighty corporeal silence, carrying the scent of the birth and death of matter, which turns the artificial light into a heavy exhale. The trip back through this desert is unbearable for me, the oasis at its center attracts me like death, death, made smooth by the footsteps of all the pilgrims before me. And they, these plants, are so innocent in their essence. So eternal. So vulnerable. So impenetrable, despite the light that streams through every one of their cells and reflects in the pupils of our eyes, burned out from longing for the miracle.
Sub specie lucis. From the perspective of light. is the first solo exhibition of the writer Zornitsa Gramkova. The exhibition presents a series of photographs of the blossoms of various plants and reflects the author’s long-standing interest in botany. In Gramkova’s photographs, light cuts through the plucked blossoms like an X-ray, placing the reproductive organs of the plant on the border between the potential and the impossible, between the emerging cell and the inert matter, between life and death.
Zornitsa Gramkova (b.1981) is the author of the short story collections The Path of the Ants (2013, St. Kliment Ohridski Press) and They Never Tell (2019, Fama Publishing House), the latter nominated for the 2021 EU Prize for Literature. She has served as an editor for Free Poetry Society since its establishment in 2017. She is also member of SAFSI (Society of Animalists, Florists, and Scientific Illustrators), and works as a journalist for the Hristo Botev Program at BNR, hosting the Sunday morning show “Sunrise.” A longtime performer of Irish dance, she is an assistant teacher at the Cunningham Academy of Irish Dance Sofia. This is her first solo exhibition.
The exhibition is a project of DESPOINA – an online platform that provides space for forms of life that can (or cannot) be considered art. Inspirations, observations, leaps into the unknown, exercises, dreams, and rituals are all manifestations of an expanded creative process that seeks the essence of existence.
With the support of the Art Affairs and Documents Foundation and the National Culture Fund.
