‘‘Containing the past within my body and the visits of these spaces allowed for a connection to be made. Embedding memory and history, which never belonged to me. Diving into foreign and mother lands encapsulated.’’

Vernissage: 11th July 2019 19:00

On view: 11 - 14 July 2019

RSVP

‘Balkan Mine’ is an extensive research of the shifting layers of history, memory and trauma related to the forced labour camps of the Bulgarian communist regime (1946-89) by photographer and researcher Krasimira Butseva (1994, BG).

In a multimedia installation including film, photography, sculpture and layers of sound, she is recreating her personal journey through the spaces where a dictatorship was once enforced at its hardest. This ongoing project starting in 2016 is Butseva’s collection of accounts of victims and a record of her own subconscious and fragmented experience of history as an outsider. By letting the spectator become part of the intimate narratives of both the survivors and the artist, she is able to construct an image of unseen historical events and formulate a bridge between past and present, thus referencing the unspoken trauma carried within a society and its future generations.

Artist's Bio

Krasimira has an MA & BA degrees in Photography from the University of Portsmouth, she has exhibited her work at Seen Fifteen Gallery, London (2019), Phoenix Gallery, Brighton Photo Fringe (2018), In motion / Prototype, Sofia, Bulgaria (2017), Four Corners Gallery, London (2017), Pingyao International Photography Festival, China (2016) and Uncertain States / Mile End Art Pavilion, London (2016).

Curated by Krasimira Butseva & Maya Hristova

The artist will be present at the opening.

The exhibition at EEP Berlin's Gallery will be accompanied by an artist talk and a workshop:

13th July | Saturday 5-6pm | Remembering whilst forgetting, In conversation Krasimira Butseva & Maya Hristova

14th July | Sunday, 4-6pm | Trauma & Ritual, Reading & Writing Group

As part of the workshop Krasimira Butseva will do a series of readings of texts which have influenced her works on show at Balkan mine. From excerpts of fictional stories to history books, artists texts and archival documents, this session will blur the lines between real and imagined allowing for the artist’s narrative to come across. The reading will also be followed by a writing exercise in relation to the themes discussed.

EEP Berlin’s Gallery

Liegnitzer Str. 34 | 10999 Berlin [Kreuzberg]

Wed-Sun 2pm - 6pm

‘‘To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.’’ --John Berger

Vernissage: 26th April 2019 19:00 | Young American Book launch during opening

Exhibition duration: 27 April - 17 May 2019

Having graduated with an MFA in painting in the Czech Republic Marie Tomanova moved to the United States in 2011 and began to work through her feelings of displacement living there. By 2014, she rearticulated this idea of displacement into a self-portrait series in which she attempted to see herself in the landscape.

Having grown up on a farm in a small village in south Moravia, she felt that she fit somehow with nature, that it was an essential part of who she is, and that as an immigrant living in the United States, she had grown distant from that physically and emotionally. It is only through this self-portrait work that she started to gain a sense of self-worth as an artist and as a person and began to be able to see herself in the United States and during this time she was also taking the Young American portraits. And in a way, the self-portrait work in nature and the Young American portraits are really very close to the same thing. The self-portrait work is about seeing herself fit in the American landscape and the Young American portraits are also about fitting into the American landscape, but in a social aspect.

As photographer Ryan McGinley writes in his introduction to Tomanova’s debut monograph Young American, “This is a future free of gender binaries and stale old definitions of beauty. In Marie’s world people can just simply be. I wish all of America’s youth culture looked like Marie’s photos of Downtown, diverse and inclusive.”

New York Calling brings together for the first time a wide range of Tomanova’s work including: self-portraiture in nature (2016-ongoing), Young American (2015-ongoing), and Live For the Weather (2005-2010/2017), a series of early images taken while growing up in Mikulov, Czech Republic.

Curated by Thomas Beachdel and Maya Hristova.

The artist will be present at the opening.

EEP Berlin’s Gallery

Liegnitzer Str. 34 | 10999 Berlin [Kreuzberg]

Wed-Sun 2pm - 6pm

Vernissage: 20 March 2019 19:00

Exhibition duration: 21 March - 7 April 2019

We're the only species on earth, which believes in stories, myths and narratives. The ability to believe in stories allowed us to form large and complex societies.

Societies today seem to be repeatedly looking towards the past for ideas on how to move forward, while many sociologists note that we lack new stories and historical paradigms on which to draw the maps of our future. How does a cultural narrative emerge? How do we choose in what to believe and has this choice become more conscious in this modern day and age?

Fyodor Telkov (RU)

Pavel Borshchenko (UA)

Sasha Chaika (RU)

Yana Kononova (UA)

Sasha Chaika and Yana Kononova will be present at the opening.

EEP Berlin’s Gallery

Liegnitzer Str. 34 | 10999 Berlin [Kreuzberg]

Wed-Sun 2pm - 6pm

‘Something should by all means be hidden, at least one undisclosed secret among the exhibited works, something meaningful to you, something only you would know about.’

Urban legend becomes the starting point for Ukrainian photographers Subach and Poliakov’s exploration of the real and hypothetical spaces of the Polish city of Katowice. Elena says that the fall of the Soviet Union with the following process of post-industrialization, have in her opinion brought about the return of life led by superstition. While in the modern microcosm of the city, Poliakov is interested in the accidental nature of urban transformation and the echoes of global and local influences onto its material surface.

Subach and Poliakov are based in Lviv and the focus of their work lies in the cultural space of Western Ukraine with its unpredictable urban environment, local myths and contemporary utopias. ‘City of Gardens’ is a collaborative project, which takes them to a new place - the modern metropolis and former center of the mining industry in the Polish region of Silesia, Katowice.

Vernissage: 1 March 2019 19:00

The artists will be present.

Exhibition: 2 - 17 March 2019

EEP Berlin’s Gallery

Liegnitzer Str. 34 | 10999 Berlin [Kreuzberg]

Wed-Sun 2pm - 6pm | eepberlin.org