Samsara
2014
In every Bulgarian village, at the beginning of the cemetery, you can see an old brick building, which I call “the tunnel to the afterlife.” It is a simple room with whitewashed walls and a green baseboard of enamel paint, complete with two rows of long wooden tables, made in a hurry and covered with a cheap plastic tablecloth called mushamà. According to funeral custom,people gather there, sit around the tables, relatives offer food and rakia “for God to forgive”, and it is not an uncommon occurrence for this sad ritual to turn into a merry and even rowdy celebration in honor of the deceased. It is only in the countryside, where everything is more ordinary and rustic, that one can still witness such a celebration, because when one enters the “tunnel of the afterlife,” one is more inclined to think about time flying away quickly, the wheel of life, which Buddhists call “samsara,” and with the help of a few glasses to turn the sadness into joy – at still being present in this world.
It is in this space exactly that I wanted to place the pages of my diary, a frieze of drawings and memories that, like stills from a very long film reel, surround the walls of the “tunnel of the afterlife.” A site-specific project that was my own personal, intimate ritual. They say that in his final moment, before a man’s eyes, his life flashes by, like a film reel sped up… And I ask myself: what did he see then?
Kiril Cholakov
In the Dissection of Memories project, Kiril Cholakov explores the complex relationship between personal memory—as part of collective memory—and historical time. Through texts and images in pencil, charcoal, and ink drawings (2014), and later in large-format canvases (2017), he tells stories from different periods of his life that emerged spontaneously and randomly, depending on how the creative imagination interacted with images of the past.
Curated by Irina Batkova
Kiril Cholakov, Samsara, site-specific installation in Izvor ( Bulgaria) 2014
