Contemporary Space, Varna
Presents:
Fish party 2015
A new version of the performance Fish Party by Mariela Gemisheva
Curator Maria Vasileva
In 1997 during the exhibition called “The version of Erato” showing the female point of view of erotica, Mariela Gemisheva put a baldachin veil in the center of the exhibition space with a sexy fashion model under it frying sprat fish. The contrast between the white veil symbolizing virginity, the erotically dressed beauty and the cooking smell of fish turned the performance into one of the most significant works of Bulgarian contemporary art dealing with the problems of females in society.
Mariela Gemisheva develops this project into the sequence Fish Party, presented for the first time in ATA centre for contemporary art in Sofia in 2004. In it three “sterile white” professional top models, styled as for a high fashion show, perform the same action and seduce the audience, passing around the fried fish, signifying how culture meets the literality of everyday life. The author turns on all our senses as she undertakes an invasion on taste, smell, sound and sight. Their total interference breaks the spectator’s confidence concerning their owplace in the situation and their own understanding of it. Gemisheva successfully invokes a reaction of all possible visualizations, social and cultural deposits, by involving familiar, even banal, actions and gestures.
This this edition the performance will include the author herself and two assistants in outfits, custom designed for the occasion. A main priority in this instance, will be the provocation of self, the ritual, original action in the situation of “conflict” between the social and the intimately personal, the opposition of the festive against the mundane, the exquisitely feminine against the casual dullness of the regular housewife.
