The Heavenly Host

Part of the I SEE YOU project

THE HEAVENLY HOST is an exhibition that completes the serial project - I SEE YOU by the visual artist Youlian Tabakov. The overall idea includes a spatial installation at the Gallery +359 Water Tower, Sofia, as well as exhibitions with a series of drawings at the Art Gallery in Ruse, Sredets Gallery and the City Garden in Sofia.

The current exhibition at the Toplocentrala Gallery - Cube includes objects spread across the space like parchment. The main visual element is the humming bird as a symbol of the eternal spirit and the immortal human soul, as well as bird feathers allegorical of angelic presence. For Youlian Tabakov, recalling the biblical world in the present day is a way of speaking about the state of the spirit in the contemporary world, weighed down by materialism, consumerism, exploitation and deception.

It is important for the author to remind us of the capacity to connect with others, which is also the capacity to love. He does this without name-calling or moral condemnation, but with unquestioning criticism, turning his gaze to the multitude of other species and honoring their existence. Here is what Youlian Tabakov shares:

"The core of the project, or in other words - what excites me as a person and what I try to express as an artist, is the boundary between the spiritual and the material, the absorption of spirit by matter and the emptiness that remains in us when matter is devoid of spirit and turned into an inert mass. I find it a vitally important theme at a time when form takes precedence over content and yet multiplies itself endlessly, lulling the senses while leaving the soul to languish."

To speak of the spirit in the modern age of the rational, the practical and the useful requires courage and scale. Youlian Tabakov's exhibition has both. It looks back to cultural contents and texts only to move forward, beyond the institutions of faith, to a democratic, human-centered view of the world as a place of love and connectedness to life.

"The Heavenly Host is an exhibition about the relationship between spirit and matter, the forces of fall and rise as a vertical of existence and as open possibilities"
(Vladiya Mihaylova, curator, Toplocentrala Gallery - Cube)