Photographic exhibition ‘Sergei Borisov and the Soviet Artistic Underground’ opens in Plovdiv in October
An exhibition entitled “Sergei Borisov and the Soviet Artistic Underground” opens at Sklada in Bulgaria’s second city Plovdiv on October 1 and continues until November 30 2018.
The exhibition is of works by the famous Russian photographer Sergei Borisov, dedicated to the Russian underground artists from the time of Perestroika.
The exhibition is presented in the context of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2019 and the significant events of the Glasnost and Perestroika that led to its demolition.
Borisov was born in Moscow in 1947. In the late 1970s he founded Studio 50 A, which became a seat of the Moscow Bohemians.
Borisov’s studio was often compared with Warhol’s Studio 54, due to the fact that Studio 50 A also attracted a wide range of free-spirited people. The studio hosted exhibitions, presentations and gatherings of those who, then overshadowed by official culture, 10 years later would become symbols of the new post-Soviet era.
His ironic and critical or poetic photographs from the time of Perestroika and the early 1990s are tools for acquainting the West with the Soviet underground culture and its artists, who were then setting in motion a new wave of counterculture. In this period, photography was still a risky occupation, but the nonconformist Borisov used it to bravely show the “other side” of the Soviet dogma.
The exhibition project is organized by “Art Agency” of the curator Stefan Stoyanov.
Borisov’s works have been exhibited in museums and galleries the world over. The artist’s focus is on portrait, the nude, and studio and landscape photography.
“His Plovdiv exhibition, set to take place in SKLADA in October 2018, will be a place where guests will be able to meet the artist, as well as critics and curators,” the Plovdiv 2019 Foundation said.
“The show is meant to kick-start a stimulating discussion about the times of socialism and transition seen through the lens of art,” the foundation said.
