Project Description 

Produced by Sofia Contemporary 2013 Festival, curated by Ovul Durmusoglu

Camera: Rayna Teneva

Video and audio editing: Stanislav Kolev and Samuil Stoyanov

Filmed in the National Museum of Natural History – Sofia, Bulgaria

This work is part of a series of videos that are shot in different buildings around the world. The basic idea is to make a kind of night portraits of buildings using unusual dynamic lighting of various interiors. Spaces of the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia are full of content (stuffed animals and insects, fossils), which by its nature stop time of the matter. This context gives to the very light, as an act of “revival” additional meaning.

„Samuil Stoyanov’s site-specific space portraits series started with the Geozavod building in Belgrade where the 53rd October Salon took place in 2012. To study these modernist spaces of display and presentation, the artist first destabilizes the light, the fixed element of every space as such. Through these portraits every building he interacts with becomes a part of Stoyanov’s artistic cosmos. In a gesture of hurling a light bulb above his head making the largest possible circle, Stoyanov, in his own words, makes reference to the movement of the space objects in the universe. Here the figure of the artist appears not only as a pseudo-scientist conducting inventive experiments but also as a black hole holding all the centrifugal movement in an orbit around him. The artist chose the Natural Museum of History in Sofia for the venue of his first-time such experiment in Bulgaria of a site-specific portrait as the museum is a classic display place for geological history.“
Text by Ovul Durmusoglu (Turkey, Germany)