Post-Soviet Social Consciousness in Bulgaria and Beyond: the Development of Sofia’s Post-Avant-Garde with Todor Rabadzhiyski
- Grace Miskovsky
- Aug 14, 2024
- 8 min read
As a post-communist nation, Bulgaria today is reckoning with the remnants of its storied past, specifically in the revitalization of its avant-garde art scene. As repatriated artists alongside emerging contemporaries fill a hole in Sofia's contemporary art market, a remnant of the Soviet arts program which put Socialist Realism on a mighty pedestal, artists in Bulgaria now are paying homage to the legacies of their parents and grandparents who may have fleed to reach artistic realization in the West. Todor Rabadzhiyski, a Bulgarian-born contemporary sculptor and visual artist, now based in the Hague, Netherlands, grapples with the paradoxical identities interwoven in his artistic evolution. As a classically trained Eastern European artist, he has a keen sense of post-Soviet academic painting, yet through his radical, socially engaging practices, developed at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, he is the vanguard of a generation of experimental artists gathering in Sofia. In his most recent exhibition, made in collaboration with Robin Whitehouse, titled "Lobsters and Shrimp On My Plate, I Want My Pockets So Fat They Inflate," the two tracked the historical and physical movement of lobsters. As creatures living in the depths of the sea, they make a literal journey above water and onto the plates of, in the colonial era, prisoners and poor families, and today, those at the top of a social and financial hierarchy; they have made an associative trek from "garbage meat" to luxury. In a four year exploration of this idea, Rabazhiyski and Whitehouse created over 135 porcelain works cast from lobsters purchased from local markets. They staged performative acts of catching their handcrafted lobsters in the canal, presenting them at market, and finally, showcasing them, alongside a selection of neo-exressionist and classical paintings of the creatures, in Sofia, Bulgaria. The final touch was a lobster bisque, distributed at the opening and using leftovers from the lobster restaurant Rabadzhiyski worked at. I met with Todor to discuss Bulgarian post-war art history, the developing scene in Sofia, and lobsters.
GRACE MISKOVSKY: Can you introduce yourself to my audience? How would you classify yourself to someone who doesn’t know you - are you a sculptor, an installation artist, a painter? Who are you?
TODOR RABADZHIYSKI: I am Todor Rabadzhiyski, a Netherlands-based artist but from Bulgaria. I am a visual artist. From a very young age I was very interested in art. It was surrounding me. My grandfather was a painter. It was the only way that I could have communicated things. Usually my mediums are intertwined between classical painting, sculpture, and installations. It depends on the context of the artwork, and the social engagement with it. My practice is split into mixed or universal cliches, between this kind of pop-culture but also an ancient representation of antiques, what we would classify now as archival memory or an artifact. [I’m interested in] how history can be modified in a wrong way to be possessed by a power structure. With my work I use stone, porcelain, clay, and plaster. I graduated from the National High School of Art with a concentration in book making, so I have a lot of classical background as an Eastern European artist. Modernism here happened but in a mostly architectural sense, not really in the presence of artists' teachings or in the schools. It was kind of a subliminal moment because the structure of it is very classical. You have to have an academic drawing of real people, so you have a model. You’re kind of a rebel teen so you’re like, “Yeah, I just want to do the contemporary stuff,” because you also go to exhibitions. We have this internet, we’re kind of in this internet generation, so you could have seen what was happening abroad, you might be lucky enough to travel. It was kind of nice that I [then] went to the Western academy in the Royal Academy of Art [in the Hague, Netherlands], where I graduated. There, they’re like, “You need to forget about everything.” If you want to peel an apple and show only the peel or something like this, you need to reason it. It was in a more rational post-avant garde sense.
GM: Do you feel like the push towards classical drawing in Bulgaria creates an essence of resistance among students and therefore a push for them to expand their practice and think critically? Or is it more of a limiting force, and people fall deeper into it? What’s the reaction?
TR: There is not enough resistance from the students. They are not so vocal, because they don’t know. [The academies] teach some kind of - it's not propagandic, but it's not great. It’s forceful because it's part of this old [Soviet arts] program… The good thing about this high school was that there were different classes of people. We all studied together, we all went to these places for one week at the start of the school year where we painted different cities. There was no division between the classes. We all helped each other. If I have these nice pastels, or they have some paint that I need, we share it all. It was a communal way of thinking, which I think art has in general. It's not judgemental, it’s discursive. It's political, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's meaningless.
GM: This theme you’re talking about, this communal, democratic feeling of sharing, is this a product of a Socialist mood within Bulgaria? Is this a common thing to find? Or was this more specific to your high school?
TR: I definitely think it was some sort of a leftover of the Soviet [rule], but the good part of it.
GM: I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the evolution of post-war art history in Bulgaria. Obviously there’s this history of Socialist Realism starting in the 40s. To my understanding, that’s not to say there weren't other art movements going on, but not on an official or mainstream level.
TR: A lot of [artists] fled to save themselves in Western countries. My grandfather couldn’t. His family wasn’t connected enough so he couldn't escape. That was the social reality. Nowadays, we can see a lot of those artists who escaped are coming back. They realized themselves in Paris or Berlin, and they became citizens of the world. In a way, they used their trauma of those times. The art was made to function in the political power structure.
GM: Do you see the art scene in Sofia today as a reaction to the past?
TR: Yeah. It's trying to go in a more futuristic way. It’s more developed. There are a lot of galleries who are inviting foreign artists and a kind of exchange. It's kind of new to us because of the capital reasons. We don’t have a market for art. That's the main reason why people go to educate themselves, or be a worker artist for Jeff Koons, or to go abroad to pursue a career, to use their chance. It's been occupied, the art market, it’s been overly occupied. That's why you need to find your reasons. For you, what's the fundamental? Can you starve on it? Nothing’s promised. The scene is more alive because more artists came back to Sofia to develop it. A lot of old artists reconnected. Aron Roth, he’s American but based in Bulgaria. There is Natalia Jordanova. These are young characters, emerging characters. There are established artists, like Nedko Solakov, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Dimiture Stefanov, and Nina Kovacheva. It’s still in development but it’s a progression, in an inter-cultural sense. We are also becoming more Westernized as the East moves. After this post avante-garde period, you cannot say where something is coming from completely, like its origin. You can never actually define what is classical Bulgarian, or what is classical Polish.
GM: I know what you mean, which is that it’s really hard to track the origin of an artistic movement or even a work of art because everything is a product of an intercultural dialogue. It’s hard to pinpoint where something begins and where it ends.
TR: You can either reflect on these things, like me as a reflective artist, or you can create new ones. Of course, you need to reason it. What’s your starting point? What are your research questions? What are you trying to convey? I don’t want to put a stamp on it, like it’s “Bulgarian-made” or it’s “Netherlands-made.” Of course, the structure works in this kind of way.
GM: I want to talk about your most recent exhibition. Broadly, can you describe what the show was about?
TR: Me and my collaborator, Robin, it was a four year project that we shot in the Hague, Netherlands. It had three stages: first, the catch. There is a video of how we caught a porcelain lobster from the canal in the Netherlands. The second stage is the market. It’s part of the series, “Lobster and Shrimp On My Plate, I Want My Pockets So Fat They Inflate,” which is kind of a sarcastic way of putting it in this old historical idea that is still contemporary and still quite performative. In the second stage, we gave back a lobster to the people from the market, because we bought a lobster to cast the first ones, from which we made 135 porcelain lobsters. After that, we showed them in the Swimming Pool Gallery in Bulgaria. It was a nonprofit organization, which was good for the social aspect of it. How you make something luxurious easily distributed for other people without the hierarchy of principle. We literally traced some kind of representation of classical paintings and a mixture of contemporary paintings or neo-expressionism, or photography. We also cast [lobsters] in aluminum, because tin cans were being distributed in the 80’s and the lobsters could reach more middle class families and society. We are playing different roles in these different stages. For example, at the Swimming Pool Gallery, we took [lobster] leftovers from a restaurant in the Netherlands, and we made it into a bisque soup. We froze them and we flew with them, and we made this bisque soup. You put cognac, a bit of lobster leftovers, and butter. We made 30 casts of aluminum [lobsters] which we made in the Netherlands. After that, there is a video of how we transported them with a van. It was focused on this transportation and giving access to food. We are tracing this historical line, how [lobsters] have been going through time but also in a physical sense, how our work is being transported.
GM: In that way, transportation, transit, and politics become very central. Can you talk about the conceptualization process? How did you begin thinking about these things?
TR: My friend is a chef in a lobster restaurant, and I was also working there. We were all opening oysters and seeing this kind of clash. We were poor art students, like let’s eat oysters. [There is a] universal cliche: the world is your oyster, so go and get it. Grasp it. Everyone can be rich or everyone can taste this status. Which is crazy, because it’s not a race. It’s about how grateful you are. We made this [lobster bisque at the opening] literally based on the leftovers of this restaurant where rich people go, and some of them didn't even know how to crack lobsters. Influencers come and take pictures of their food but then they don’t eat. They’re not showing any kind of gratitude. It’s funny because lobsters live 75-80 years. It’s kind of an infinity topic with them, as a symbol of reincarnation. The Yorgos Lanthimos move, “The Lobster,” and a bunch of Salvidor Dali references. In art, we wanted to represent them in a way that they’re not usually represented, like cracked and cooked, which is [them] being shown in a hedonistic perspective. [There is a recent] rule in Western countries that lobsters are forbidden to be boiled alive and that they need to be cut from the tip of their head to the back of their tail. They need to be cooked in a more humane way. Of course, it’s not so regulated. There is no lobster police. I guess there are bigger issues nowadays.
GM: I know you were talking about maybe taking this show to New York, so what’s next?
TR: [My collaborator and I] both have our own different artistic paths and then we meet in this gray zone of friendship, and we share a studio in the Netherlands together. It's a discourse between me and him. We have a glass of wine and then start snowballing ideas. There is no hierarchy between us. We think that if it’s New York, then we go commercial in a more satirical way, in a way that’s like, we reached “The America” - ah! Which could be funny, but also, it could be very flat. Maybe we will have this in the coming years.
GM: You guys have a place to stay with me if you end up coming.
TR: It would be nice, we can cook you some lobsters.
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