Biography
Peter Chinovsky was born in Sofia in 1988. He lives and works in Varna. In 2012 he graduated in Printmaking at VTU, Veliko Tarnovo and in Animation at the Art College of Screen Arts, Sofia, 2008.
His solo exhibitions include: "No Territory", Little Bird Place gallery, 2022, curated by Radoslav Mehandzhiyski; "Where is the work", Depoo gallery, 2021; "Das zweite Gesicht", Cologne-Mulheim Cultural Center, Cologne, Germany, 2016.
In 2022 he was nominated for the BAZA Contemporary Art Award and participated in a group exhibition of the nominated artists at the Sofia City Art Gallery. He received the Overall Presentation Award at the 9th Small Graphic Forms Forum, KO-OP Gallery, Sofia, 2021. Other group exhibitions include : Art Start, Young artists to watch in 2022, curated by Vesela Nozharova, Stefka Tsaneva, Goethe-Institut, 2022; "Shared Space", National Autumn Exhibitions, curated by Galina Lardeva, Hindlian House, Plovdiv, 2022; "Turn Back Time", curated by Martina Stefanova, Sofia Dimova, ReBonkers Cultural Center, Varna, 2022; "Temporary Crisis", curated by Hristo Kaloyanov, part of Sofia Underground, Matrix Club, Sofia, 2022; "Tomorrow and Beyond", NFT project, Structura gallery, curated by Maria Vassileva, Sofia, 2021; "Future Oracles", part of Sofia Art Week, 2021; "Fragile like paper", Fifth International Biennial of Art on Paper Di Carta, curated by Valeria Bertesina, Schio, Italy, 2021; National Exhibition-Competition for Painting and Sculpture, Rayko Alexiev gallery, Sofia, 2021; Residency at NoPoint Atelier curated by Martina Yordanova, 2021; Symposium for Contemporary Painting, curated by Sasho Stoitsov, 2021.
About
My work is directed by an interest in the synthetic as a visual manifestation of the inability to translate raw experience into symbolic languages. Man-made, the machine-produced, the artifact, I see as a form of compression and organization of sensory information as part of the processes of making sense of experience and bringing it into a form that can be communicated.
The fact that we can navigate the structures of language creates a feeling of "making-sense" that diverts attention from the inarticulate dimensions of experience. Even the most correct statement in some sense remains wrong. I am interested in exploring nonsense and incoherence, disturbing the making-sense machinery, as a means of maintaining distance from believing in statements and representations too much.
Gallery
Peter Chinovsky
The map is the territory, 2022.
Installation
Details
- Material: Video projection over pigment print, backpack, video.
- Width: 145.00 cm Height: 210.00 cm Depth: 40.00 cm
- Description: On top of a photo of abandoned shoes on the street is projected a video of real-time translation of a Kafka quote from the original German to English. The text is :
"Solange du nicht zu steigen aufhörst, hören die Stufen nicht auf, unter deinen steigenden Füßen wachsen sie aufwärts."
Franz Kafka, "Fürsprecher", 1922
"As long as you don't stop climbing, the steps will not end, they will multiply upwards under your climbing feet"
Franz Kafka, "Advocates", 1922
On display in the backpack is a repeated video of a domestic cleaning robot building a virtual map of the premises, but always reaching a point where it loses what it has built and starts again with the wrong spatial orientation.
The abandoned shoes, the discarded backpack, are tools in the attempts to map the environment that get nowhere, in the context of Kafka's fictional situation of the endless steps, a form of failure to form representations that fully correspond to raw experience.
Peter Chinovsky
Exoskeleton, 2022.
Object
Details
- Material: MDF, acrylic glass, acrylic sheet photo-transfer, cable, computer board parts, paint
- Width: 15.00 cm Height: 40.00 cm Depth: 20.00 cm
- Description: Osseointegration, the process of joining a mechanical prosthesis to organic tissue, connecting nerve endings to electrodes, is a modern analogy to the old question of the relationship between spirit and body. Consciously controlled prosthetic limbs raise questions about the boundary between animate and inanimate, between one's own and a foreign body.
Peter Chinovsky
Bite-bit-bitten, 2022.
Object
Details
- Photographer: Stefan Markov
- Material: Bicycle parts, paint
- Width: 100.00 cm Height: 120.00 cm Depth: 70.00 cm
- Description: Languages and objects are similar in that they consist of parts and rules for putting them together. It seems to us that the sum of the parts constitutes the object, but in a sense it is itself only in so far as the parts are joined according to known rules.
In an experiment by Rebecca Lawson, participants were instructed to reproduce the construction of a bicycle from memory. The results reveal the surprising extent to which we do not know otherwise everyday objects.
Similarly, in language, cosy grammatical coherence relaxes our vigilance: the familiar configuration of components creates the illusion of understanding. Changing the rules for joining the parts draws attention to the incongruity between representation and experience.
Atex thar dt orea dtell smore.
Peter Chinovsky
Neither atoms, nor stars, 2022.
Object
Details
- Material: MDF, acrylic paint, paper, glue
- Width: 50.00 cm Height: 60.00 cm Depth: 1.20 cm
- Description: A structure based on a simplified version of the idea of a control panel as a "tool for producing consequences from a distance". Machine-mediated actions as maintaining distance between the actor and what is happening, softening the sense of personal responsibility.
Peter Chinovsky
Decisions taken at the time of speaking, 2022.
Object
Details
- Photographer: Rad Thrill Films
- Material: UV print on optical lens, overhead projector Fresnel lens, flexible arm phone stand, acrylic paint
- Width: 30.00 cm Height: 35.00 cm Depth: 10.00 cm
- Description: Images of window reflections in Google Street View are pixelated : each color of a standard RGB pixel is a separate image.
The work addresses the distance between perceiver and perceived created by the use of digital technology as a mediator of perception.