LITTLE PEOPLE

2010

Little People
15.10 – 30.11.2010
ES CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
Merano (Italy)

Little People (Piccolo Popolo) is the title of the project by Kiril Cholakov, created especially for the contemporary art gallery Erwin Seppi in Merano.
4,000 hand-cut black cardboard figures invade the gallery space in groups of 100, organizing themselves according to the presence of light, evoking a sense of vitality, sensuality, and passion.

Kiril Cholakov, a Bulgarian artist who has been living in Rimini for years and is interested in themes related to inner “disorientation” in his artistic exploration, has created for his first exhibition in Merano a collection of pagan symbols and gestures meant to convey emotion. All of this is achieved with the help of paper—a chameleon-like material ready for transformation—and shadows, a typical element in the search for symbolic structure.

Shadows in Cholakov’s work are dreams, reflections on mystery, enigma, and simulacrum. “The shadow is our other self,” the artist emphasizes—“a dark and vague object/object-subject of desire and repulsion, an attempt to express the impossible, to trace the outlines of a projection, a borderline situation and a quiet conflict between the depicted world and the present” (between the representation of the world and actual reality).

The shadow world used by Kiril Cholakov echoes the symbolist world of the early 20th century. Just as expressionist cinema used strong contrast lighting to create a dialogue between shadow and light, Cholakov uses black silhouettes to install small imaginary populations in the gallery. The figures, folded into themselves in impossible poses, become proto-humans—sleepwalkers. An attempt to trace the contours of the invisible, a fascination with the mystery and ambiguity of desire, and that which escapes the light.

Cholakov’s installation is also a reference to the Balkan myth of vampirism; the figures in the gallery become a kind of colony of bats, “little people” (asthe artist calls them), a “pale and elegant aristocracy with a cloak”. Cholakov’s vampires are no longer monsters but tormented gentlemen who capture the liminality of human experience. Limen, in Latin, is the invisible line that separates and unites the inner and the outer, and metaphorically allows for fluid movement between different symbolic universes. The vampire is a being that dwells on the threshold between life and death, imagination and reality, the physical and the immaterial, desire and necessity. It is a borderline subject that can exist only through its representation and experience—a representation that is more of a performance, an ambiguous element, a gamble, rather than a form with clearly defined contours.

Like the tenetz (the traditional name for vampires in the Danube region) described by Yordan Radichkov (a Bulgarian writer and inheritor of a significant Bulgarian tradition of magical realism), whose body is a transient condition but also an essential essence, so too do Cholakov’s shadows prompt us to question the construction and recognition of the idea of the “subject” within a culture and language.Perhaps because of their archetypal and ancestral allure, Cholakov’s shadows do not simply reflect surfaces, but become real opaque bodies that insert themselves between the source of light and the illuminated object—vague or dimly outlined figures that provoke confusion, curiosity, and suspicion. After all, shadows easily distort the figures they reflect, depending on the light and the part of space onto which they are projected.

In this way, Kiril Cholakov reflects on the shifting realities that combine the everyday and the universal. The multitude of silhouettes becomes a creative stage that unites the capacity to absorb external influences, the ability to return to one’s roots, and individual responsibility.
Curated by Katya Anguelova