THIS NEVER HAPPENED /2010/
With the call „Baleva – on the scaffold“ Bulgarian politicians invoiced in 2007 publicly to the murder of a curator (for more information see here: http://en.qantara.de/The-Barbarians-of-Batak/8905c8987i1p507/). The Bulgarian art historian Martina Baleva wanted to show in an exhibition, how art affects the national imagination. For this she chosed the painting by Antoni Piotrowski „The massacre of Batak“ (1892), one of the founding myths of the Bulgarian nation. The politics and the media foiled the exhibition and put out a bounty on the curator, who since then lives in exile in Berlin.The video „This Never Happened“ is based on visual material from the banned exhibition. The painting „The Massacre of Batak“ serves as a naturalistic setting for historical photogrpahy and cinema footage as temporal an medial addition of the iconographic stereotypes of difference as Self and Otherness, victims and perpetrators, Christians and Muslims, established in paintings of the 19th century.