The Vaska Emanuilova Gallery presents a solo exhibition by artist Aleksandra Chaushova, curated by Dessislava Dimova, as part of the Meeting Point program. The event is part of the special exhibition program marking the 120^th anniversary of Vaska Emanouilova’s birth. The exhibition includes a series of drawings and a play script created especially for the exhibition, as well as a documentary video.

Chaushova’s exhibition Romantic Species is a meditation on the possible images of the woman artist, which intertwine the figure of Chaushova with that of the sculptor Vaska Emanouilova across time and geography. In her exquisite, detailed drawings, as well as in Chaushova’s texts, the woman artist appears as a strange species—she is a mythical animal, an exotic bird; she is hidden behind a mask, but she is also the creator of sculptures mysteriously coming to life, a builder of monuments to the unfulfilled, a technologist of impossible desires and substances.

The bird is а “totem” animal of the artist, through which she experiences her fate as a foreigner. Exotic birds have captured the human imagination since antiquity, known and sought after both with scientific interest and as a valuable acquisition, part of the conquests in the history of the West. Aleksandra Chaushova sketches her bird drawings “from nature” among the rich collections of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels—the city in which the artist lives and works. The taxidermied exotic bird serves as a symbol of the attitude towards nature in the modern order, but also of the social function of art itself as a means of perpetuation.

The Ever-Changing Monument play continues the narrative of the “romantic species” through a free interpretation of the work and fate of Vaska Emanuilova, mostly through her authorship of figures for monuments, including the dismantled Monument to the Soviet Army. The text is based on documentary sources (some from Emanuilova’s personal archive), but remains in the realm of pure fiction—it is about an imaginary monument, the antithesis of all monuments: the monument to that which has not yet happened. The sculptures in the permanent exhibition come to life as possible but yet to be realized monuments. Similar to other previous scenarios in which Aleksandra Chaushova has given an interpretation to her drawings as costume designs for a play (for example, in Annulment of the End of Things, from 2015), here too the drawings of bird masks are ideas for scenography, in this way connecting both the women artists and two seemingly different narratives and historical moments. In them, everyone and everything can find themselves on a pedestal, and can also come down from it later.

This exhibition is being held in partnership with the Bulgarian Art and Culture Foundation and with the support of the Sofia Culture Programme and the Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles