Venelin Shurelov’s works explore the transitional states of the human body by focusing on his marginalization. They also relate on decoding the language of modern myths and encoding them in new creatures, to the intersection between man and technology, human and subhuman as a sub-product of the social, political, economical and cultural situation. In ROTOR the figure is a body of gesture partially closed by function, partially released from the fiction.
In the border area between performance and installation I set up my action passing through two different phases. In the first part, starting from an empty stage, in front of the audience I build a facility, a sophisticated electro-mechanical kinetic mechanism. The second part takes place in the final 5 minutes and show the final merger between my body and the existing structure. Thus formed a hybrid body moving under the rules of automation, but is immersed in a fictional world. // V. S.
The video was filmed in the vicinity of the village of Yasna Polyana, in the Strandzha Mountain. I connect the thick black smoke, which I spread out over the horizon, with the mangi (kilns) for the production of wood charcoal. The region is seriously threatened by human activity in the exploitation of natural resources, and the vulnerability of the ecological systems is visible. The obsession with raw materials is the context for the video work, but in my video vision, the result of these alarming processes becomes visible as an abstract concept of modern man – insignificant, impermanent, inconstant – exactly like black smoke above the horizon. // V. S.
born 1977, lives and works in Sofia / multimedia installations, performance, scenography.
The annual Week of Contemporary Art in Plovdiv, organized by Art Today Association, is one of the most significant events in the artistic life in Bulgaria.