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The world according to Solakov: working in an ever-proliferating range of mediums Bulgarian Nedko Solakov uses fiction, confession and equivocation to navigate a post-Soviet landscape of loose ends. Playfulness, his midcareer survey suggests, is the skeptic's best weapon
Art in America, Dec, 2004 by Sarah McFadden
Another conundrum looms in The Truth (The Earth is Plane, the World is Flat), a mixed-medium installation from 1992-95 that constitutes an ingenious send-up of propaganda by its own means. In it, Solakov gathers the testimony of seven fictitious witnesses who claim that the earth is flat. The apocrypha include clippings of published newspaper reports written and planted by the artist, a made-for-TV interview with an actor playing the part of a former Soviet astronaut, a recorded speech by a made-up politician, drawings, photographs, etc.--exactly the sorts of fabricated "evidence" that can be marshaled to persuade people of just about anything, particularly when belief in the idea being promoted is said to lead to inner peace and well-being. It's a confidence game updated and used for political, or in this case, the artist's, purposes, which seem to lie partly in sowing confusion.
Of course, propaganda is mostly associated with deception, and everyone knows that the earth is a sphere. Its shape is an established scientific fact that we learn in school and take on faith as being true. And there's the rub. Solakov the skeptic would have us keep an open mind about such things. With the ironic aside "The strange thing is, that in one way or another, this story is related to Bulgaria," he reminds us that as the Soviet Union lost its grip, old paradigms--round-world views--were challenged and supplanted by antithetical, and, to many, quite possibly absurd-seeming models. One of the fake documents, a letter from a supposed detractor of the Club of the Friends of the Flat World, puts reason on what would appear to be the wrong side, the one, in this piece, of brainwashing and illogic. It reads, in part: "Is it possible that people have become so mixed up as to challenge the obvious? The members of the club are warning us to never see things as absolute and to not be sure of anything."
That warning is the artist's own, and he has repeated it again and again in provocatively iconoclastic, as well as deeply humanizing, works that refuse dichotomies and instead embrace dualities and paradox. Straightforward examples include the drawing series "Good & Bad" (2003) and the installation Good News, Bad News, which was first created in 1998. Both combine visual images (composed of wash drawings and small objects, respectively) and written anecdotes that highlight the positive and negative aspects of the situations they relate, ranging from a genetically modified bean pondering its identity to an airplane about to crash into a mountain that is sure to survive the accident.
Concurrently with The Truth, Solakov worked on "Well-Known Stories," a series of 23 ink-and-wash drawings, each incorporating a one-line, handwritten caption. The drawings are based on familiar motifs from the New Testament, one of the greatest good-bad stories ever told. Solakov presents his scenes from unfamiliar angles, focusing not on their subjects' well-known sacred side but on imaginary, profane details. Thus, the Pieta is represented from behind, with an atypically broad-framed Mary scratching her back with her left hand while supporting the body of her dead son with her right: "They were so stupid--these little creatures.... Even in such a moment they continued to disturb her." Another scene shows her, again from behind, doing the dishes "after their (last) supper ..." as a group of figures files out the door at the far side of the room. She gets the runs on the flight to Egypt and, after her baby is born, finally has sex with her husband: "and then (after the kings went away), Joseph was for the first time with his wife...." Witty and indecorous, the tenderly rendered drawings are both shocking and affectionate.
