Process Anatomy #1: Aksiniya Peycheva. Tales of the Limit

Process Anatomy №1. Tales of the Limit, Aksiniya Peycheva

STRUCTURA PROJECT ROOM

The first exhibition of the series Process Anatomy will present Tales of the Limit, a multi-disciplinary project by the artist Aksiniya Peycheva in which she collaborates with a physicist and microbiologist. The work creates a prerequisite for dialogue and exchange of the same visual information over and over again between the fields of visual art, artificial intelligence and microbiology. The same image – an AI-generated portrait of a non-existing person – is painted by the artist as a classical portrait on canvas and then transferred via a specially created matrix fed with various bacteria strains to a bed of agar where they grow to reproduce the portrait. These three fundamentally different methodologies bring about different results, through which Aksiniya calls into question the efficiency of the systems of communication and how visual information (or the lack thereof) can be seen as an indicator of the functionality of these systems.

Within the context of Process Anatomy, the work Tales of the Limit and Aksiniya’s practice in general, expresses the multi-disciplinary quality of artistic research, especially in the implementation of scientific research methods and processes in the conceptualisation and production of the artworks. As well as a processual characteristic that is based on the observation and implementation of biological processes and systems. The exhibition will take the final form and function of the object as a starting point and will move in reverse following the journey from idea to materialisation. Throughout this journey, we will inquire into the role of Aksiniya’s visual exploration into the production of knowledge in relation to how information is transposed in different media, what is lost and what remains. Is the medium simply subservient to our will, or there are other forces at play that give it agency? This question can be reformulated to resonate throughout the rest of the curatorial programme. To what extent the process is a controllable system of thoughts and actions or an “organised chaos” of experimentation and exploration?

The “Process Anatomy” is a curatorial project by Vasil Vladimirov which will explore the complexities of innovative art practices and their exploratory characteristics dissociated from a predetermined final object. A series of exhibitions will present existing works by four different artists. Rather than in their materiality and “finished form”, they will be present through ideas and references related to the artistic research and the process of making behind them. The gallery space will be transformed into a studio of sorts where viewers will be involved in a process of“reverse engineering”, tracing the research methods and processes at the heart of the respective artistic practice.

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Aksiniya Peycheva is a transdisciplinary artist, based in Sofia, Bulgaria. The focus of her work is the process of ‘visual translation’ where she explores the possible ways of moving pieces of information between different fields of knowledge – ‘how one or several scientific fields can be combined in order to answer a question only important to art.’ She often collaborates with scientists, and her projects are also accompanied by a theoretical part, the result of a long study on certain topics, which include the topic of the visual translation of music or pain. Light, kinetic, interactive of multilayered glass installations, her works contain different layers of information, using various scientific methodologies, which can be explored as an attempt to redefine the fields of knowledge and to rethink the initial need to set their boundaries.

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Tales of the Limit was produced in the programme of DA Lab E-valuation, 2021 by the DA Lab foundation and was presented at Heerz Tooya, Veliko Tarnovo at DA Fest 2021

The project is realized with the financial support of the National Culture Fund.
Graphic Design: Zahari Dimitrov

Images