Between the Spacesuit and the Angel - the Unusual Travels of Mariela Gemisheva
Maria Vassileva
Mariela Gemisheva is an artist who does not stay within certain boundaries. Known as a fashion designer, a multiple winner of the Golden Needle Award of the Bulgarian Fashion Academy (1997 and 1998 for avant-garde fashion, 2017- Designer of the Year), she is far from being satisfied with this amplitude and has been attacking our notions of genres and styles for many years. There is hardly anything more characteristic that can be said about her than turning the catwalk into a showroom and the gallery into a stage-designed space with elements of a fashion fiesta.
Once the Mariella Gemisheva phenomenon is in place, it seems easy to play with the audience's expectations and turn mannequins into performers and clothes into lavish sculptural creations. This was far from the case when, in the early 1990s, her first shows appeared, abruptly changing the imposed notion of fashion and art. It is no coincidence that one of the first highly memorable actions, the fashion show "Experiment II" , 1996, took place in XXL gallery, then a place for radical interventions and artistic solutions. The division between the arts that still exists in our country does not allow or accept such categorical leaps from one field to another. The "purity" of genres, built up over decades for strong ideological reasons, does not allow for such contamination of the field, because it would lead to other visual and conceptual "outrages". Highly educated in one of the best studios at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Gemisheva does not tolerate any restrictions. She created a specific hybrid whose significance goes beyond the artist's personal achievements and occupies a much larger territory in changing consciousness.
Her attitude to gender moved in the same logic, long before the word gender came into circulation. Her models often seem endrogenous, though she almost always works with women. The outfits are devoid of that "femininity" popular in this country lately, which draws directly from tastelessness and vulgarity. Based on historically established patterns and traditions from East to West, they construct a supra-national and timeless notion of dress as something more timeless than the pettiness of the moment. On the other hand, however, Mariella Gemisheva does not leave without comment the problems of women in the contemporary world and actively engages in their negotiation. Emblematic for contemporary Bulgarian art remains the performance "Hello, Girls", first realized in 1997 within the framework of the exhibition "Erato's Version". In it, the artist explores the male dream of women as sexy goddesses and perfect housewives, which was imposed in the public space.
In the last ten years, most of her appearances have been related to her native city of Kazanlak. She creates a number of works and organizes actions, exhibitions and performances that deal with industries important to the city: the oil rose and arms production. Recently, she has added the historical heritage - the tombs in the Valley of the Thracian Kings. This comprehensive view allows her to reflect on the city's past and present, and to reconcile seemingly completely opposing paradigms.
In 2011, for her show at Gallery in a Drawer “Ogms”, she filled cartridges with a mixture of rose oil and gunpowder, creating the most murderously passionate perfume of all time in the work “Guns and Roses Oil”. Linking one of the main ingredients of the beauty industry with the fabrication of articles of death gave birth to this dynamite combination. At the heart of the idea is an interest in the relationship between the delicate scent of roses and the smell of gunpowder. Rose oil mixed with a certain amount of explosive transforms the objects. It fills and finishes them in a different way than expected, thus changing their function. The cartridges are "defused" and transformed into pleasant objects to possess.
The artist develops her idea in the performance of the same name from 2015, realized in "Shipkov’s House" in Kazanlak. The cartridge cases, capsules and bullets specially processed for the project were turned into "muskals". The project is dedicated to the border between beauty and violence, between life and death, between the old and the new. It has a surreal element, much like the world we live in. The step between the divine and the ugly is often very small.
In 2018, Mariela Gemisheva presents the installation “Fashion Objects in Rose Colours” - an artistic-conceptual intervention in the thematic spaces of the Museum of Roses in Kazanlak, where soft rose sculptures actively "come to life" and give a new pulse to the "stagnant" museum exhibition. Her works contain no irony in relation to popular clichés. Rather, they are about cleansing and shaking off old cling that has hidden the true potential behind a crust of old-fashioned visions and messages. Mariella Gemisheva has been creating the representative outfits of the traditionally important Queens Roses for the last 5 years.
"Secret Performance" was realized in 2019 in the tomb "Griffins" from the 3rd - 4th century BC in the Valley of the Thracian rulers near Kazanlak. It is a kind of self-portrait of the author as a museum exhibit in a special state of sleep only in front of the camera of Kalin Serapionov.
In 2021, she presented a video of the performance and a cartridge of rose oil at Structura Gallery, Sofia, which in a way completes the trilogy by connecting the real with the immaterial. The frankness of reality collides with the dream zone. The border between the two becomes almost invisible. From antiquity through recent history to the temptations of the present, Mariella Gemisheva creates a beautiful visual environment, saturated with many sharp commentaries on the world we inhabit and our own place in it.
For the author, the autobiographical element is of great importance. And far from it being for vanity's sake, it is for the courage to stand face to face with the problems of the world around us as well as one's own. From the 2002 project “Out of Myself, in which she subjected herself to the "undressing gaze" of photographer Danail Shturbanov, through “Self-Portrait”, 2008, in which she once again took on the role of the model, Gemisheva has not been afraid to reveal her innermost feelings and fears, and to subject herself to the criticism of the uncompromising viewer. Similarly, she looks into situations close to her heart - from her hometown to her family ("Spring-Summer, Autumn-Winter", 2000).
We began this text with a statement about the multidimensionality of the artist and the interdisciplinary nature of her work. It is no coincidence that she decided to once again participate in the life of Kazanlak by showing her works among the permanent exhibition of the Art Gallery. Her attitude is by no means domineering or dismissive. On the contrary, Mariela Gemisheva feels deeply connected to this place where her formation as an artist began. She is part of it and it is part of her.
In one of the gallery's rooms, a beautiful white garment of stiff, transparent silk floats above the heads of viewers. You can perceive it as a spacesuit or as an angel. Somewhere in the infinity of possibilities that this notion offers us, between the fantastic and the divine, between the real and the absurd, lies the art of Mariela Gemisheva. And her presence in the museum is certainly not accidental.
