2022

Kiril Cholakov has given his exhibition at the museum the title of FRA/BETWEEN. Not only because the artist lives and works, travelling between two places – Rimini, Italy and the village of Izvor in Bulgaria, between two different languages and cultures; but also because he places the viewer in the position of being FRA/BETWEEN the artist’s personal history, private recollections, the whims of consciousness and the reality we are involved in, our collective memory and common biography; between the anecdotes that sneak into his journal of drawings, to universal truths.

Kiril Cholakov’s solo exhibition includes two characters: first, that of the artist and the other – a character from the book-phantom. Led by their curator, the pair embark on a strange game even before having met.
Nadezhda Dzhakova has invited the writer Irina Batkova to compose a text that responds in an unusual way to the artist’s oeuvre, to appear in the exhibition as excerpts from book-phantoms. In addition to Kiril Cholakov’s drawings, site-specific works, and paintings, and the extracts from book-phantoms by Irina Batkova, a video portrait of the artist by director Milena Kaneva can also be viewed.
In literary passages, Kiril Cholakov discovers visual images for his drawings.
Thus, the hero of the book suddenly sneaks into the large-format entanglement of drawings that the artist creates on the museum walls. The image of the man-stork, having woven a nest of his thoughts and ideas, walking through the fog and snow, turning into a lonely bare tree, follows his creator, the artist, from one gallery to the next. The author-artists in the exhibition become more than one, while the tale transforms into multiple narratives that often have no beginning or end.
The character from the book-phantom speaks of such places of new possibilities, in which the chain of events where one thing turns into something else – is perceptible. The seemingly chaotic directions resemble a labyrinth, which after a long, winding trail leads you back to the beginning…
Such is the large-format drawing on the wall: a place for observation that, with prolonged staring, loses its clear outlines – the silhouettes of objects, animals, plants, and people become emptied of narrative, disintegrating to form ‘a new web’, an all-consuming or, rather, an all-embracing vision. FRA/BETWEEN is a special space for shifting layers, for breaking down and rebuilding images. A transitional space generated by the encounters or the brushing together of different worlds, a border point of disintegration, a farewell to observing the images of the material world and the building of new ones.
The drawing on the walls of the museum will gradually fade out and, when the exhibition ends, it will disappear, just as our memories are obliterated with time.
The exhibition is the sixth in the Autobiography Project of the Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art programme.
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova

In 2021, Dr. Nadezhda Dzhakova presented me with an unexpected challenge when she invited me to participate as an author in an exhibition alongside the artist Kiril Cholakov. I have known Kiril’s work for many years and have curated two of his exhibitions, but the idea of being a co-author in a shared project shifted my perspective from an external analyst of his artistic world to literally becoming a part of it. What made it easier for me to choose the media for my contribution to the exhibition was my long-term observation of his work, which has always been connected to text-whether literary or academically analytical. Since the artist lives between two countries and uses both text and images in his visual practice, we decided that the name of the exhibition should be “Between.” This became the starting point for my work on the project as well-participating in the creation of a special space between words and images, one that immerses the viewer not only in perceiving the objects of the exhibition but also in analyzing their own perceptions.
My exhibition objects are manuscripts of non-existent phantom books. They tell the stories of a person who gradually loses his sight and begins to create a library of mental images, which will serve him when he can no longer see, and of a female artist who analyzes the colors of the surrounding world and attempts to create working models from her observations in order to teach her students. The texts gradually intertwined with the important themes that Cholakov has been working on for years—how memories are formed, what the nature of the feeling of nostalgia is, how we sense the passing of time and the traces it leaves in our lives, and what the role of our personal stories is in the collective memory, among others. Thus, the territory between the texts and the images gradually created an unusual vortex, into which the visitors of the exhibition were drawn, and it became a space for new conversations, new
memories, and a new rethinking of our work on this project. The manuscripts from the phantom books continue to appear…
Irina Batkova