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VOIN DE VOIN (1978)
Voin de Voin was born in 1978. He lives and works in Sofia. He holds an equivalent to MA degree from DasArts, Amsterdam, and diploma from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, Goldsmith College, London, EICAR –International School for film and cinema of Paris. He is the co-founder (with Snezhanka Mihaylova) of the Institute for Performance Art and Theory that existed between 2012-2016.
Since July 2016 he is running an independent art space in Sofia called Æther and sibling space in The Hague named Æther Haga.Æther seeks to offer a possibility for experimentation and to generate critical reflection on contemporary obscurities; of living through art, science, politics and activism. It wishes to engage and bridge the local and international art scenes in different propositions and to activate collective rituals and thinking
Voin de Voin works in various fields of the arts, ranging from performance to installation, incorporating his research in collective rituals, psycho-geography, sociology, psychology and new media.Among his solo shows are “SUR(REAL)RENDER”, Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv (2018); “How Do You Picture It?”, The Fridge, Sofia (2016); “Disconnecting Intergod”, Vaska Emanouilova Gallery, Sofia (2015); “ἀ-μετά-καλύπτω,” Sariev Project Space, Plovdiv (2015); “33° North – 33° East”, Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv (2012); “Retrofuturo”, France fiction gallery, Paris (2012). Group exhibitions and projects include “Doubt, Connection, Sufferance, Aisthesis, Eros”, ArtInternational, Istanbul (2014); “Contemporary Modifications”, Espace Wallonie, Brussels (2014); “Moon Voyage 36” , The Fridge, Sofia (2014); “Bulgarische Arbeit”, geh8 Kunstraum & Ateliers e.V., Dresden (2014); “Аnn and the Giant Appel”, lecture performance, De Appel Institute for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (2014); “Let’s Twist and Cross”, Gallery Bertrand Jordan, Paris (2014); “My Friend, the Artist”, Coexistences Art Space, St. Petersburg (2014); Sofia Queer Forum 2014 – “Manifestations of the Personal”, Vaska Emanuilova Gallery, Sofia; “120 Minutes to Paradise”, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK), Berlin (2013); “If Not, Tomorrow”, Artitude V.E., Berlin (2013); ParaDice, Kunstverein Ausgburg (2012); “Radical Languages” (curators: Maaike Gouwenberg & Joanna Zielińska), Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor, Krakow (2012); “Round Robin” (performance, part of Critical Art Ensemble Program), dOCUMENTA (13),
My work examines performative structures that invest in the idea of collective consciousness and ways of coming together. In the last couple of years though my interest has set into examining the idea of information passed by DNA. Psychologists have begun exploring the existence of traumatic transmission, not only through the passing on of stories through affective or unconscious cues from parent to child but also vis-a-vis the imprint that these events have on DNA, through complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms. Through epigenetics, trauma mutates genres, affecting the lives of families across generations. That which was felt by one individual at one time, is not static or self-contained, it is passed physically. The conditions of trans generational trauma also occur collectively, amongst generations within a larger community or population, causing a cultural trauma that reverberates outward into society. When entire groups of people suffer from a large-scale emotional or psychological trauma, the loss of identity and cultural impact continues to affect their descendants, mutating the genes to bare signs of suffering that are felt within their lives. Through mutation, history is felt physically and emotionally, entering the psyches of generations to come.Symptoms also differed based on ethnicity and type of original trauma. Enslavement, genocide, domestic violence, sexual abuse and extreme poverty are all common sources of trauma that lead to intergenerational trauma.An inquiry into the conditions of mass hysteria, psychoses, hypnoses and the rise of a far-right brings us to our current era of Late Capitalism – a world of sensory overload, stimulations, electromagnetic pressure, technological developments, scientific breakthroughs, and gene modification. The present state of the political imaginary fosters a form of viral politics within society, one where the mechanisms of neoliberalism operate as an apparatus of mutation. It is a viral process that mutates and conceals itself by appropriating the projects and identities of radical politics, bringing them into the fold of capitalist hegemony – enveloping that which attempts to resist it through absorption, transformation, and regurgitation. Like a virus, which infects a host cell, causing it to regenerate as itself, killing that which fights against it, capitalism has a particular power, one that has continued to mutate itself to survive within changing political landscapes. external, alien memory of something that can be appropriated and understood, but rather it remains dipped in the liquid of our own cognitive sensibility about the world uninterpreted.
