Family Album

"When we listen to the statistics on refugees on the border between Turkey and Greece or on boats in the Mediterranean, and when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatens the European Union to open the borders, we do not wonder if we have relatives and acquaintances among them, nor do we wonder what and why they leave behind to head for Europe. We think of refugees as numbers and an unknown threat.

Krassimir Terziev takes out the well-known from the news images of hopelessness at the borders and in the roads and puts them in the cozy escape of the family album. Numbers become people, crowds become personalities with their own stories. In his work, Terziev not only reverses our direction of thinking about "refugees" from the anonymous to the personal, but also changes the imaginary trajectory of escape in time and space. It remains for us to ask ourselves how the refugees from the Middle East today are different from the Bulgarian or Macedonian refugees during the Balkan Wars or the Greek Civil War."

Stefka Tsaneva

/excerpt from the text for the exhibition "The World did not stop turning", 18.06.-31.07. 2020, Goethe-Institut Sofia, curated by Stefka Tsaneva/