Standing Voices

Decades of human progress, technological advances, scientific discoveries, wealth and growing comfort of life have given birth to seemingly limitless consumerism, catastrophic exploitation of resources, psychological disorders of the personality and deep loneliness. The anxiety and alienation that many of us live with testify to the rupture and loss of ties between people, as well as of humanity as a whole in relation to other beings and nature.

The exhibition 'Standing Voices' takes place in the context of the conflicted present and the crises of modernity. It addresses primary rights and inalienable realities necessary for life itself: the need for air, water, food, for security, for connectedness with others, for freedom. 

The basis of the exhibition is the recollection of social and environmental movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which were forms of spontaneous and public civic association and embodied the will for rights, freedom and value of human life. At the heart of these processes were the protests of the citizens of Ruse against the chemical plant Verachim in the Romanian town of Giurgiu, which, after its construction in 1981, began to gas Ruse with chlorine, creating a truly critical and life-threatening crisis for the residents of the city. Mothers with prams and citizens of the city came out in the square in Ruse with appeals for a future, for tomorrow for their children.

From the perspective of the present, the exhibition revisits Wenceslas Havel's concept of ‘living in truth’, bringing to the centre questions of life as political and ethical existence and of voices rising as position and right. These are voices - bodies that overcome silence and express the will to breathe and exist with dignity.

The narratives of the past resonate with the voices in the present in the sense of loss of right and meaning, as well as in anxieties about a future in which zones of emergency, exclusion and death are increasingly opening up.

The exhibition also addresses the ecosystemic scale of contemporary living - the water, the air, the planet, species and bodies beyond the human. Some of the works are interventions in the National Museum Earth and Man's space, exploring symbolically and metaphorically the idea of the irreversible impact of the human world on nature.

Vladiya Mihaylova

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The exhibition takes place at the Cube Gallery and ’Earth and Man’ National Museum.

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Exhibition events

14.05. 18:00 - 20:00 - Film screening and conversation with Oliver Ressler
At the ’Earth and Man’ National Museum

17.05. European Night of The Museums
The Cube Gallery is open until 23:00
18:00 - 20:00 - Thinking-in-Assembly "When Thinking Was Done with the Lungs..."
Initiated by Snejanka Mihaylova

31.05. 15:00 - 17:00 - Lecture and conversation with Ovidiu Țichindeleanu
18:00 - 19:00 - Curatorial Tour with Vladiya Mihaylova at the Cube Gallery and the  ’Earth and Man’ National Museum