"Liminal recollection...between memory and reality" - exhibition by Michaela Lakova
11 - 18 July 2022
Opening: 11 July, Monday, 18:00 - 20:00
18:00 - 20:00 - 18:00 - 20:00 - 20:00 - 20:00 - 20:00 Depoo Gallery, ul. 12B Vrabcha, Sofia
The exhibition is part of the project "e-valuation 2.0" of the DA LAB Foundation, which is realized with the support of Sofia Municipality
Michaela Lakova (1987, Sofia) is a visual artist and researcher working between Sofia and Rotterdam. Her work includes video and installations, and the themes she explores are erasure and memory. She holds a BA in Stage and Screen Design from NATFA (2011) and an MA in Design and Communication from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2014). Selected group exhibitions include: "Altered Voices" Doza gallery, Sofia; TENT Cinema, Rotterdam; Rosa Stern Space, Munich; "Digital Aesthetics", +359 gallery; Digital Art Festival, Goethe Institut; Sofia Art Week, Æther; Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz; "What Remains", Graz; Radical Networks, New York; Medialab Prado, Madrid; ZK /U, Berlin and Lydgallerit, Pixel Festival, Bergen.
http://mlakova.org/
"Liminal recollection...between memory and reality" explores digital and analogue holograms, a hologram is a form of imaging that allows the recording and reproduction of illusory three-dimensional images using laser light. The basic principle of the hologram is "The part contains the whole and the whole is contained in the part". Michaela discusses the hologram beyond its well-known and commercial application and how this expressive medium can serve an artistic purpose manipulating space and image.
The content of the hologram uses a personalized avatar, statues and reliefs from ancient Egypt as well as abstract imagery as a natural extension of the study and related to the erasure of memory and damnatio memoriae, a Latin phrase that literally translates to "condemned to oblivion."
The e-valuation platform "Value-Value" is aimed at stimulating and producing artists in the field of digital arts and their representation, in order to develop and promote contemporary art forms created with digital media and technologies. The title of the platform is a reference to the meaning of the concepts of "value" and "worth", in the technical and aesthetic context of digital media, and explores the possibilities of transforming impersonal values of the medium into socially relevant values. It seeks to understand what matters to authors who have chosen digital forms for artistic expression and how they respond to the themes and challenges of the "new normal", as we call the current pandemic period.
In the second edition of the platform in 2022, the projects of Mihaela Lakova and Petko Tanchev were selected to receive a production grant and assistance from the DA LAB Foundation team for the creation of the new works. The new projects are presented as solo exhibitions at the Depoo Gallery in Sofia.
DA LAB Foundation was established in October 2018 with the mission to initiate, produce and organize projects in the field of digital arts in Bulgaria, to support Bulgarian artists in their development, as well as to carry out collaboration with artists and cultural organizations on the national and international scene. The founders of the foundation are Venelin Shurelov, Galina Dimitrova-Dimova and Antoni Raizhekov - artists and curators with extensive experience in the field of contemporary and digital arts, organizers of the international festival for digital arts DA Fest, as well as lecturers at the Master's Program "Digital Arts" of the National Academy of Arts, Sofia. Among the most popular and successful projects of the Foundation are the International Digital Arts Festival DA FEST, organized together with the National Academy of Arts, the Online Platform "Dictionary - Digital Art", the process-oriented interactive installation "One Man :: Urban Electronic Corpus" and others.