(2024)
work in progress
In 1996, I saw for the first time with my own eyes the consequences of two wars — in the collapsing Yugoslavia and in Georgia. I want to immediately clarify the word “consequences”, not military actions. I felt the horror where, in seconds, the body expels sweat and mucus like a snail thrown into boiling water. Fear, hunger, mud, and blood — that’s all I saw, along with people running in complete chaos, driven purely by the instinct to survive.
It was then that I truly understood what destruction, collapse, and war mean — and how absurd the difference is when watching a conflict on television from another country, judging who is right and who is the villain, while comfortably sitting on a sofa…
My grandfather was killed in World War II when he was only 24 years old, and my mother became an orphan in the very first year of her life. This tragic fact has likely shaped my perspective on wars — a theme that cyclically returns in my works, connected to the conflicts in Yugoslavia (1991–2001), Abu Ghraib(Abu Ghurayb), Iraq, Ukraine (2022–25), and Gaza (2024–25).
Kiril Cholakov
14/01/2021 Kiril Cholakov