site.btaArtist Who Paints Dust Wins Competition to Represent Bulgaria at 2022 Venice Biennale

Sofia, January 11 (BTA) - Michail Michailov has won a competition to represent Bulgaria at the 2022 Venice Biennale. His project entitled Here You Are and curated by Irina Batkova, was chosen among 17 other projects in the competition.

The winning project was presented at the National Art Gallery on Tuesday.

The Vienna-based Michailov gained popularity with his paintings of dust. He studied painting at the Veliko Tarnovo University but in Vienna he became accutely aware that painting was not enough for him to achieve full artistic expression. He remembers with a smile one of his first artistic interventions: on a poster at the Vienna Museum of Modern Art he added him name to the names of all the famous artists. "I saw an empty spot on the poster and it provoked me to add my name among those of all the famous artists," he says. The intervention went unnoticed for quote a while but then somebody spotted it and called the museum to ask who that Michail Michailov was. "Then I got an email and my name was removed from the wall that they call Wall of Fame, but the glue remained and as it gathered dust my name reappeared," he says.

What preoccupies him now is the question of human existence: "who I am, who we are and how we are connected with one another and what we should take care of in our future."

Here You Are will be set up in the Spazio Rava which is located in central Venice, overlookign the Grand Canal close to the Rialto Bridge.

The Culture Ministry will be paying a 80,000 euro rent for the space where Michailov's work will be displayed. The project itself is a permanent installation worth 60,000 leva.

This will be the tenth time Bulgaria is represented at the Venice Biennale (after 1920, 1942, 1948, 1964, 1993, 1999, 2007, 2011 and 2019). For a second, time the participant has been picked by a jury appointed by the Culture Ministry.

First held in 1895, the Venice Biennale is the oldest and most prestigeous contemporary art forum. The previous edition in 2019 attracted participants from 90 countries and more than 593,000 visitors.

Each edition includes an international project with a theme chosen by its curator, independent national projects and an official parallel programme.

Although the theme of the international curator project is not binding for the national representatives, they often reflect it in their works. The theme of the 2022 Biennale is The Milk of Dreams, which curator Cecilia Alemani borrowed from the title of a book by surrealist artist-storyteller Leonora Carrington. LN/