You Can Only See What You Have Inside You

exhibition by Zhelko Terziev
November 22 - December 11, 2022

With the support of the National Culture Fund

Facing a certain place and an image of that same place, the viewer can doubt the authenticity of both. Supposing he is relying only on his senses to distinguish the place and the image, his eyesight has to establish a significant difference between the two. The uncertainty is only deepened by the viewer’s ability to tell his own position as such from the one of what is being observed.

Zhelko Terziev’s “You Can Only See What You Have Inside You” is based on that uncertainty in telling the two apart (as long as they exist) and shakes the reality of the employed process, the eyesight. The collected “observations” aren’t trying to reconstruct reality or create a whole, but bypass the structuring principle in a fragmentary net of almost, but not quite unriddled symbols.

– Hristo Kaloyanov

Zhelko Terziev (1976) graduated from the National Academy of Arts in 2001 in the classes of Bojidar Boyadjiev and Andrei Daniel, and in 2005, he got a Master’s degree in “New Media” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His solo exhibitions include: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” (with Krassimir Terziev), +359 Gallery, Sofia, 2018; „The Eight Ball“ Club Sofia, 2008; „Opak“, Pistolet Gallery, Sofia, 2007; „No Comments“, Irida Gallery, Sofia, 2001. Some of the exhibitions in which he took part are: “Radical Formal Analysis, +359 Gallery, Sofia, 2020, curated by Peter Tzanev; ”Formatting the Absence. Archive.” +359 Gallery, Sofia, 2019; „Object of Desire”, Arosita Gallery, Sofia, 2018; „Substories”, part of Project Donau, Carlsruhe, 2015; „Substories Toys”, Academy Gallery, Sofia, 2014; „So We Are Friends”, Pistolet Gallery, Sofia, 2011; „SUB form Substories”, Rayko Aleksiev Gallery, Sofia, 2011; „Avalanche, Apocalypse Now, episode 4“, nbsp Gallery, Paris, 2007; Diagonale festival of Austrian Film, Vienna, 2006; XI Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and Mediterranean, Athens, 2003. In 2008 he was nominated for the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art.

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