WARTEN AUF DIE EINS, 2017
Ausstellung von Dr. Gatev

Curator: Yovo Panchev
16. November – 15. December 2017
Goethe-Institut Sofia, Bulgaria

In the present artwork-exhibition, or as it has already been formulated as a genre by Dr. Gatev’s previous projects “universal artistic model”, a bitter bankruptcy of the modern national ethos is presented. And as a gesture to the so-called cultural elite, and as a technological jargon mastered sketch “Waiting for the Unit” visualizes the failure of the uplift.

“Waiting for the Unit” at the Goethe-Institut in Sofia consists of a model of a wall with elevator doors (4 photo-posters) and a light box with a blueprint of an elevator cage. The originally planned technically developed mock-up, installation and video are replaced in the exhibition with static images and an informative illuminated drawing. The digit “0” indicating floor “0” alternates with “00”, “000”, “0000” or “-0”, “-00”, “-000”, etc. in wandering around the base elevation point. Quantitative accumulation that does not lead to qualitative change proves that the distance from zero to one is vast, stretchable, insurmountable. Not in this way.

The project unfolds a seemingly clear problem, although it relies more on personal readings and own references. It is locked in horizontal movement, not overridden by a vertical movement mechanism. This technical failure visualizes the cold and narrow elevator shaft impasse, designed to be a passage, a breach and a way.

So superimposed, the two directions of movement – the real and the unattainable, form the composite image of the tension of one’s own bankruptcy. Whether the ascension, the overcoming of gravity, is a desired goal, or a self-consciously impossible lyrical dream, is not to be guessed at. The situation itself, the mise-en-scène of this universal artistic model sets horizontal variants of transportation from point “o” to another “o” and the feeling of a tension caused by the desire to upsurge, a look from zero to the unit – a line below 45 degrees.

In “Awaiting the Unit” the expectation is derived literally as a condition-goal, but also a condition-problem. A circumstance that mirrors the human condition. The horizon of zero and that of the impossible and unattainable unit present things in the trap of a dualism closer to charming heresy than to a saving faith.

Twenty years after “Only Possible Way”, “Waiting for the Unit” continues the theme of the mechanism (of being) through the technology of transportation as a cultural phenomenon, equally close to child’s play and the existential limit.