This exhibition is based on an unexplored and previously unpublished drawing by Rayko Alexiev – a friendly caricature made at the close of the turbulent year of 1923. For reasons that remain unclear, the artist tore up and discarded the drawing shortly after creating it. It was salvaged and brought to Sofia by Olga Zhivkova, sister of Masha Zhivkova-Uzonova (at the time engaged to the artist Dechko Uzunov).
A century later, the drawing has made its way to us, imbued with all its stories and mysteries. The figures in this winter scene of departure are a group of Bulgarian students and intellectuals – some already established, others just embarking on their creative careers. Among them are the poets Nikolay Liliev and Elisaveta Bagryana, the writers Svetoslav Minkov and Georgi Raychev, the artists Rayko Alexiev, Dechko Uzunov, Konstantin Shtarkelov and Masha Zhivkova. Most would go on to become key figures in Bulgaria’s cultural life between the wars, and some even beyond, though their fates would ultimately diverge greatly.
Exhibition curators Svoboda Tsekova and Anton Staykov immerse themselves in the challenge of creating an installation that inhabits the borderland between an intimate exhibition and a library reading room. The narrative is concentrated in one of the rooms of the Dechko Uzunov House Museum in Kazanlak; not just in a room, in fact, but in and around a single chest of drawers. That’s where the exhibition begins: with the rescued, unknown, and previously unstudied drawing by Rayko Alexiev from 1923. Through text and images—photographs, archival documents, reproductions of paintings—visitors are enveloped in the atmosphere and context of that “crazy” year, when disaster for some became opportunity for others.
The exhibition is realised with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture as part of the project Cartography of the Present – A Cycle of Four Exhibitions.