02.12 – 19.12.2022
Оpening: 02.12.2022, 18:30
To touch at the edge is a collaborative project, a group exhibition and a book, which begin its life a year ago on the internet. This initiative has gathered visual artists, curators, researchers and writers from six countries, working with the notion of “borders”. The authors study the concept of borders through the context of archeology, nature, resistance and colonialism, as well as the borders of our bodies, these part of our identity, generational history, culture and the collective.
This project was created through a collective process which took place in the span of half a year, with the participation of six individuals from Bulgaria, Serbia, the Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, Turkey and Greece. In our meetings, Elisabeth Ajtaj, Ezgi Erol, Teodora Jeremić, Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian, Elena Marcevska and Lina Manousogiannaki shared personal stories from their practices, alongside memories of the recent past and present of Eastern and Western Europe, together with ideas of belonging and identity. The project was led by Denislav Golemanov, Martin Atanasov, Vasil Vladimirov and Krasimira Butseva.
The project has been realised with the financial support of National Culture Fund , the programme Group artistic initiatives
Artist biographies
Lina Manousogiannaki
Lina studied archaeology, history of art and photography. Her work focuses on human relations with nature, exploring human behavior towards the environment through different perspectives and phases of human technological achievements. Her work forms multidisciplinary research associations with archival material, maps, and text and explores relationships between installation, drawing, embroidery, collage, and photography.
Elisabet Ajtay
Her work continuously approaches and questions aspects of Western Culture. Recurring topics in her work are the notion of home, belonging, and language. Her primary tool is photography, yet her art practice is multi-faceted. It reflects her life as a nomad, growing up in and constantly moving between two different systems. Elisabeth Ajtay's work is in numerous private collections and has been shown and published nationally and internationally throughout Europe and the US.
Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian
Beatrice’s work examines facts, situations, natures, cultures and traditions, historical events, and their fields of tensions, in the analog and digital world, by extracting their elements from their context and putting them in new playful circumstances. Injustice, power relations, and authoritarian structures appear in her works. Often, she lifts the set of rules of engagement from one concept and applies it to a different idea in an unrelated field.
Teodora Jeremić
Teodora is dealing with different topics she finds important and interesting but her practice mostly focuses on the research at the intersection of decolonial practices (of knowledge, gender...), feminist resistance, and ecological thought. Interested in the power relations along the axes of gender, class, race, species, and geography, and coming from borderland space, “the other” of Europe, where Balkan myth meets post-Yugoslavian traumas and nostalgia (as well as dreams about EU) her practice is focused on transitional, liminal, marginal and hybrid, in order to understand how any type of border, knowledge, and identity is being established as well as how to challenge them.
Ezgi Erol
Ezgi researches memory, borders, economic arenas of global war, heritage, and landscape issues based on historical events, personal and institutional archives, and contemporary developments. In video production, she develop fictional narratives and poems based on historical and technical facts that explore intersectionality. Her works unfold between spaces, objects, colors, and bodies and deal with shifts in the meaning of places and their social structure. The fragmentary narratives and images are her artistic method as an attempt to investigate which and whose stories gain visibility.
(c) cover image: For a Place in the Sun by Lina Manousogiannaki