Nedko Solakov

A fervent follower of communism during his youth, Nedko Solakov (b.1957, Cherven Bryag, Bulgaria) adopted a more critical stance from the mid-1980s onwards when – at the advent of perestroika – he began to create works tinged with irony and sarcasm.

Historical Decisions (1987) is a series of seven drawings Solakov made two years before the end of Bulgaria’s communist regime. It was initially exhibited alongside two other series under the respective titles Past #1, Past #2 and Past #3, ‘so as not to take any risks’ according to Solakov. The drawings were made rapidly, on large sheets of paper on the floor of his studio, the title of each inscribed at the bottom edge of the paper. Solakov considers Historical Decisions to be among his most important works from this time. He describes it as showing ‘a group of people led by a politician who makes a full circle, 360 degrees. At that time, the mid 1980s, the communist party ruling Bulgaria only took “historical decisions”, as announced in the documents from the party congresses and in the official newspapers and media (there were actually no unofficial ones). Showing the decision-makers in a completely pointless action – returning to the place at which they started – was my main idea’.

The installation by Bulgarian artist, Nedko Solakov (b. 1957, Cherven Bryag, Bulgaria), entitled The Truth (The Earth is Plane, The World is Flat) (1992-2003), was created after the collapse of the Soviet empire and its satellite states. In this bric-a-brac of documents, manuscript declarations and recorded interviews, Solakov, supported by (fictional) characters, who are more or less famous, unmasks the mechanisms of propaganda which succeeded in diverting the most firmly rooted beliefs. His critique, a mark of absurd humour which is his own, aims, nonetheless, not only at ideologies. He is also skeptical of any naïve acceptance of these “truths”. Thus one discovers in The Truth, the letter from an opponent of the “Club of Friends of a Flat Earth” demanding that every certitude be cast into doubt: “Is it possible that people have become so mixed up as to challenge the obvious? The members of the club are warning us to never see things as absolute and to not be sure of anything.”