Two forces that create one another
curated by Irina Batkova
+359 gаllery
2021
photography courtesy of +359 gаllery
As a queer person, you are expected to “come out” - a single, defining moment that makes your identity and very existence legible to others. Yet this moment is also an arena of conflict, where queer people are often silenced with the phrase: “I don't care what you do in your bedroom; why make it my business?”. However, it is this very silencing - by an insistence of privacy - that creates the need of coming out.
In the exhibition, I am exploring these tensions by diving into a gesture of self-silencing I myself began practicing in my own studio during the year of my coming out. By revisiting, recontextualising, and critiquing my own work, I examine silence, visibility, and self-definition.
Since her appearance on the Bulgarian art scene, Sevda Semer has thoroughly and consistently explored her inner world and presented it in various projects. Personal emotions, subjective perceptions of reality and the search for identity in the form of diaries, drawings and installations in which the artist’s voice is present, outline an intimate field of communication with the audience. In “Two forces that create one another”, Sevda Semer again includes a powerful video story about an important moment in her life, but the project sets goals that are much more comprehensive than declaring a hidden intimate nature.
Quote from the curatorial text of Irina Batkova on the event of the exhibition