site.btaUnseated: Equestrian Monuments Reimagined at Sofia's Kvadrat 500

The National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 will present an exhibition by artist Lachezar Boyadzhev titled “On Vacation… Corpus equorum”, the gallery said on Monday. The exhibition features artistically and digitally manipulated photographs, in which human figures have been removed from equestrian monuments in public spaces, both in Bulgaria and around the world. The removed subjects in the works are mostly men, political leaders, historical figures, military commanders, and members of imperial families involved in colonial conquest.

Boyadzhiev explores how contemporary art can create counter-monuments and test the limits of what monuments and memorials are meant to represent, the organizers said. 

The process of collecting the images involves not only the artist himself but also colleagues, friends, and supporters of the idea. Artists, writers, activists, and historians have helped gather visual material from their own local context or from open-access databases online.

Lachezar Boyadzhiev is an internationally recognized artist known for his critical perspective on the transforming public sphere in Bulgaria and Southeast Europe after 1989. Driven by a curiosity about what lies hidden behind the obvious, in the fall of 2003, as part of a project addressing discriminatory portrayals of the Roma minority in a polarized Bulgarian society, he symbolically “removed” the human figure from the equestrian monument of Alexander II, the Tsar Liberator, in central Sofia.

The Kvadrat 500 exhibition will be on display from July 10 to September 28.