Venelin Shurelov
My works explore the transitional states of the human body by focusing on his marginalization. They also relate on decoding the language of modern myths and encoding them in new creatures, to the intersection between man and technology, human and subhuman as a sub-product of the social, political, economical and cultural situation. Theatre and performance play a major role in my creative repertoire, which also includes drawings, interactive installations, digital technologies, videos and art theory.
◦ Co-founder and full time lecturer in MA program “Digital Arts”, National Academy of Arts, Sofia (2008-) ◦ Part of curatorial team of DA FEST, International Festival for Digital Art, Sofia (2009-) ◦ Lecturer „Scenography”, National Academy of Arts, Sofia (2007-08) ◦ Part-time teaching in “Computer design”, National high school for fine arts “Ilia Petrov”, Sofia (2007-08) ◦ Part-time teaching in “Computer design”, New Bulgarian University, Sofia (2009-)
◦ Member of the Scenographer's Guild, part of The Union of Bulgarian Actors (UBA) (2008-) ◦ Member of the The Union of Bulgarian Artists (UBA) (2010-) ◦ Artist in the Theatre Laboratory “Sfumato” (2005-) ◦ Founder of the international art collective ‘Via Pontica’ (2002) and the ‘Subhuman Theatre’ (2004) ◦ Artist in theatre magazine “Homo Ludens” ◦ Part of the project Black/North SEAS organized by http://www.intercult.se/ ◦ Bulgarian artist on “AGORAFOLLY”, part of Europalia 2007, “Subhuman curiosity” open door installation
Venelin Shurelov's bizarre and phantasmic object-performances challenge anyone who attempts to classify his work within the boundaries of a single medium, form, or a discipline. Always site-specific and often staged at various public locations, his "phantomats," "drawing machines," and complex eclectic pieces—involving video, new technologies and old mechanics, found objects, images, sound, the artist’s body, and the imagination of the audience—are situated on the border between the human and the technological, the real and the imaginary. Always dependent upon the viewer’s invervention, they are marked by an interactive communicativity and unpredictability that challenges dichotomies between subject and object, self and other, artist and audience, process and product. Working in the space between performance, music, installation art, and image-making, his process-oriented work invokes the spirit of Dada and Fluxus to not only defy disciplinary conventions but also to constitute a form of practice that critiques the commodifying mechanisms and dominant institutional forms of the contemporary arts.
Zhivka Valyavicharska
