Biography
Kalin Serapionov was born 1967 in Vratsa, Bulgaria. He leaves and works in Sofia. He graduated from the National Art Academy, Sofia. Since 1998 he is a member of the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia.
His works have been exhibited in Hilger Contemparary, Vienna (2004); LCB Depot, Lester, the UK (2008); Neon Campobase, Bologna, Italy (2010); ICA Gallery, Sofia (2013); One Night Stand Gallery, Sofia (2016), Contemporary Space, Varna, Bulgaria (2014, 2016), Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia (2018).
He has participated in group exhibitions such as: After the Wall: Art and culture in post-communist Europe, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1999); Manifesta 4, Frankfurt/Main (2002); Blood & Honey. Future’s in the Balkans, Essl Collection, Vienna (2003); In the Gorges of the Balkans, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2003); Neither a White Cube nor a Black Box. History in Present Time, Sofia Art Gallery (2006); Heterotopias, 1-st Biennial of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki (2007); Sounds & Visions. Artists’ Films and Videos from Europe, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2009); Techniques, ICA Gallery, Sofia (2009); Indefinite Destinations, DEPO, Istanbul (2010); Site Inspection, Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2011); Grammar of Freedom / Five Lessons: Works from the Arteast 2000+ Collection, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015); Art for Change, Sofia Art Gallery (2015); Let Them Draw, Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv (2016); The Image is no Longer Available, Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia (2017); Forms of Coexistence, Structura Gallery, Sofia (2018).
About
I work with video and am mainly interested in videoinstallations and the ability of video to generate suspense without sliding into the narrative devices of the cinema. I perceive video as a moving image, correlations, rhythm and light. The relationship of video and videoinstallations with space, the process of turning an image into a meaning and the effect of visual impact.
My projects are about context, time, locations, circumstances, memory, places and events and their significance. I look into different human relations, characters, habits, behaviour and interconnections, contemporary cities and ways of life. My works is striving to create powerful, high-impact vision that simultaneously make use of the achievements of modern society, but also subject the clichés that they create to critical treatment.
- Kalin Serapionov
Gallery
Kalin Serapionov
I'm Safe, 2016.
Installation
Details
- Photographer: The author's archive
- Material: Neon, cables, trandformer
- Width: 20.00 cm Height: 240.00 cm Depth: cm
- Sizes: Neon dimensions including cables and transformer 180x240х5 cm
- Description: The phrase was "borrowed" from the postings in the social networks. It appeared after the recent terrorist acts and has unfortunately become an ever more often used status line. In the context of Facebook to be "safe" sounds comforting and somehow self-satisfactory. Outside though there appears another nuance – it is as if we are publically saying to ourselves that we are (kind of, thank God…) ok in the physical space.
That is where there emerges a kind of a discourse between the meanings of the status in the social network versus in the physical space. In Facebook it is personal while in the physical space the viewer is anonymous. In this way we can analyze the reception within the change of context. That is not simply a physical registrar of people but a specific kind of stating materiality and existence.
Kalin Serapionov
Choose Training, 2014.
Video installation
Details
- Photographer: The author's archive
- Material: Three-channel video installation, 4K and HD video, stereo sound, synchronization, 16'57'' (loop). 3 HD video projectors, computer with triple-head video card, audio system. Sound Angel Simitchiev
- Sizes: Dimensions variable. Detail
- Description: Choose Training is a fitness term related to choosing your training program in a closed, air-conditioned space. In the large-scale video installation this title is a metaphor for today’s world and its automated modus operandi. Choose Training is a portrait of the big city. Of any big city anywhere in the world that is inhabited by brightly lit advertisements, empty neon offices and afterhours places of entertainment.
The video installation consists of three big synchronized projections. Each one shows real footage captured by the eye of the artist. Images of blinking neon ads and bright empty offices are interspersed with people skating on ice, play bowling or training at the gym. All the images that take part in this grand narrative are organized by a sound background, created by Angel Simitchiev especially for this work. It serves to emphasize the artificial character of the environment and sets an overall rhythm to bring together the whole array of diverse images.
Installation views, Credo Bonum gallery, Sofia, February 2018
Kalin Serapionov
Displace (No wig, not lipstick, no phone and no cigarettes), 2016.
Video Art
Details
- Photographer: The author's archive
- Material: 3D HD video projector, active 3D glasses, audio system. Sound Angel Simitchiev
- Description: The project is using the original video titled A blond woman in a red skirt and bright red lipstick is speaking on the phone and smoking a cigarette (2016). This is a video portrait, where the title implies what the image might be. However, the viewer does not see the actual image but its waveforms – the range of the color graphics diagram of the video material. The viewer is invited to "read" through the diagrams and to analyze them; to try and construct own associations on the basis of the image while relying on the direction given to him in the title of the work.
The video work Displace (no wig, no lipstick, no phone and no cigarettes) develops associations and transforms it into the 3D space. It is precisely such kind of distancing and disrobing the image – it is devoid of substance and morphs into colorful, abstract three-dimensional curves and linear mutations that are indicating movement, time and space. That demolishes the original video material entirely while creating a new image with new impact.
The 3D method is side by side where the two separate parts (for left and right eyes), which come together through the use of active 3D eyeglasses.
Kalin Serapionov
In Addition, 2008.
Video installation
Details
- Photographer: The author's archive
- Material: Multichannel video installation, 6 videos on DVD (five displayed on a monitor and one projection), 4:3, sound, of various durations; 5 new plastic trash bins with wheels; 6 DVD players, 5 25' TV sets, a video projector, 5 stereo headphones
- Sizes: Dimensions variable. Detail
- Description: The installation is composed of six individual videos: Five of them are close-ups of the faces of different people sharing their hopes, and the sixth one is their colligated metaphorical image. The work presents information collected as in a sociological survey among randomly selected people from the street. They have been asked the simple yet misleading question: What are your hopes? or What do you hope for? The spontaneous answers refer to two typologically related methods of interpretation, which confront each other. They are related either with the space of the abstract (the ideal) or the material, with the global or personal. Some people define their hope in terms of their desires, while others fancy it as a dream.
The videos are arranged in a rhythmic sequence of monologues. Some follow the pattern of an intentional repetition of the same answers from different people, others set a various courses for contemplations, while a third group communicates rambling and contradictory thoughts. All are displayed as individual video portrayals, on monitors tucked into new plastic trash bins. In addition, and as a silent, metaphorical summary in the six video the camera traces a small animal (a squirrel) picking fresh buds from a tree almost fully in leaf.
Kalin Serapionov
Unrendered, 2001.
Video installation
Details
- Photographer: Bernd Bodtländer
- Material: two-channel video installation, DVD, Pal, 4:3, sound, 18'16'' (loop); 2 video projectors, 2 DVD players, audio system, synchronisation.
- Description: The videoinstallation documents the ordinary everyday situation of individuals waiting at the Meeting-Point in the Zurich main train station. The images are projected onto two adjacent walls and prompt the visitor to study, compare, and analyse the behavior of the people waiting: extroverted scanning of the surroundings, introverted reading, just hanging around, nervously smoking… There is no communication between the “actors”. Hardly anybody seems to care about the high "meeting-potential" of the site.
The set-up of the installation establishes interaction between the protagonists of the video images. The empty space between the two walls is filled with gazes and gestures as symbols and metaphors of communication. The transitory and uncontrolled situation of overcrowded, open public spaces is captured and translocated into the closed system of a laboratory-like setting, where the unrendered, footage becomes an object of controlled observation. Through the screening of the public space as a visual fiction, the usually closed gallery space is itself opened to the public and becomes an experience as a meeting point for the visitors. The juxtaposition of both spaces confronts and alters the qualities of the two completely different locations – different in terms of their urban setting, their architecture, social function and their meaning.
Installation view Manifesta 4, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt/Main 2002