feb _24
▲ highlights: a letter of visual works & references
love,
ål // ≧◉◡◉≦
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// things to share » =================================================================
★ [yupiiii, my new shiny page on Art Office Rotterdam] a few months ago i applied to join CBK’s community of Rotterdam-based artists and recently i got my application honoured! Super happy and thankful to be on that list and hopeful it will open new doors and opportunities for projects and collabs. Check out my profile with some recent works.
Art Office is there for the visual artist. With our financial arrangements, (network) meetings and online community, we offer Rotterdam artists the space to professionalise, develop and make their professional practice visible.
Art Office is a program of CBK Rotterdam. CBK Rotterdam strengthens the position of the individual visual artist and thus makes visible what the power and dynamics of the visual arts bring about in a city like Rotterdam. Professional visual artists who live in the municipality of Rotterdam and thus make an active contribution to the art climate in Rotterdam can register with Art Office.
Are you also in Rotti? Definitely register there and keep an eye on their open calls & funding opportunities.
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▲ [new <alternate maps/> work] my obsession with drawing imagined maps on canvas continues. Here is my latest work - a map with coordinates H-17.
▶▶ documentation & more info about the series here.
↳ text me if you’re interested in these works and want to see the full catalogue.
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✖ [on mapping whatever can be mapped] Creating maps is always subjective. As Ruben Pater argues in his book The Politics of Design,
The notion that maps provide an objective or scientific depiction of the world is a common myth. The graphic nature of maps simplifies reality, giving makers and users a sense of power without social and ecological responsibilities. Details like the colouring of areas or the different sizes in typography can have great political consequences.
Not to mention that each map is created by someone, whose perspective is different: his (at least in the times when cartography was established, we have only male names recorded) point of view, his location on the globe and his needs to record some places and routes. The distortions of the map as we know it (the most common map used is the highly distorted Mercator map, made by Gerardus Mercator in 1569) are quite visible on the other tries of making a more accurate depiction: the Winkel Tripel projection (1921) and the Gall-Peters projection map (1973).
Thus, in my work with mapping, i am approaching the matter with high subjectivity. Why not use mapping as a tool to visualise and record things the way we see them - with the full awareness that it is our intention? For my new visual series <mapping sensations/>, i decided to experiment by mapping things i feel. It all started when i tried to explain my long-covid mysterious symptoms to a number of doctors in two languages. At some point, i had to find a way to describe it as clearly as possible, and to remember the key elements, so i don’t miss an important symptom or data around it. For it, i drew a map of my symptoms in my notebook and went with it at the doctor’s appointments. Only to realise, if the doctor is not someone who will listen and pay attention to what i am saying, it is a complete waste of energy. However, that helped me to track the development of the symptoms and to understand where in my body they are (or at least to have a better guess). It also made me realise that i am in a place in my life, where i fully understand the limitation of doctor's knowledge, experience and ability to deal with my problem - that i need to collect information, process it, and take my own decision of how to handle my treatment with their support (or not). Parted with my childish belief that they can always find what it’s wrong and give me a medical treatment which is designed for this particular condition. It’s a team work with the patient - so it makes sense to find a doctor who is a good team player.
As a result of this experiment, i decided to continue trying to map the way i feel about things. In such an introspective period that i am now, it is the only way i feel i am able to express the mix of thoughts & feelings that bother me. Putting them on paper, canvas or digital drawing, helps me acknowledge and release them and to move on.
▶▶ the documentation on AlWiki about this series is here.
▶▶ new work in this series: <people in (my) life/> [see below]
This mapping experiment approaches people's lives as lines. Whilst the centre line (in neon green) is the protagonist's lifeline, the blue ones are the people who enter and exit one's life in different moments. In the first sketch, I tried mapping entrance and exit of people only without any overlapping. However, when I started drawing the canvas, I felt that even in this simplified version, people's interactions are usually entangled at some point. Thus, here we can see people who meet in different periods of their lives, people being born later, people who die, etc.
This work is available for purchasing, current location: Nicosia (CY).
<people in life/> // acrylic on canvas, 30x30 cm
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⊗ [illustrating things in my life] these days i feel quite the urge to draw things that i find interesting, annoying, or funny. Playing a little with my usual illustration style with a bit of a new aesthetic in a monochrome colour palette (in contrast to my neon attraction during the last 2 years) and a more curly, playful line. I’m posting those experiments right on my insta.
[cars vs. cars in Cyprus] // digital drawing
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🖤 [shoutout to some inspiring homies] This month i am sharing three Bulgarian-born visual artists who i’ve been following for quite some time & whose work i love. I don’t know them in person, hopefully will meet them one day :] Hop!
★ Iskra Blagoeva // i cannot get enough of the aesthetics of her paintings - the first time i saw her painting was around 7-8 years ago and left me in awe. She is also an interdisciplinary artist who experiments with various mediums. Her works aim to provoke conversations and awareness. She shares that “they aim to start the dialogue, not to solve the problem”, which is something i definitely relate to.
Iskra Blagoeva’s “Lilith and Eve Gamble over Adam”
★ Rozalina Burkova // works with illustration, visual arts, and animation. I’ve been following her on instagram for ages and dream of collecting some of her works (moving around so much doesn’t help me being able to purchase works and keep them around…) <3 I find her style quite easy to recognise which is something i value highly in visual arts.
Rozalina Burkova’s “Sadness”
★ Sofia Popiordanova // works in the field of book art, illustration and independent art publishing. She is mainly engaged in the design of book covers for various publishing houses. I love her simplicity and clever depictions of the soul, our emotions, and moments in time.
“Fragments”, on "Southern Mail" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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★ [free resource! Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century] Alessandro Ludovico’s newest book is available on pdf to directly download and read.
Our task, he believes, is to develop an alternative publishing system that transcends the dichotomy between paper and digital media. He focuses first on the two activities on which publishing is premised—reading and writing (with an emphasis onwriting machines and post-truth in the latter)—and then deconstructs the concept, proposing alternative strategies inspired by recent practices and unconventional uses of technology.
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