Vera Palme at Swimming Pool

Artist: Vera Palme

Exhibition title: A rat

Curated by: Viktoria Draganova

Venue: Swimming Pool, Sofia, Bulgaria

Date: October 19 – November 18, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Swimming Pool, Sofia, Bulgaria

Scheherazade prepares to pack her bag. Susanne unzips the black duffle. Shirley smiles when Sabeth touches the primed canvas. Organically treated, waterproof. Sophia holds Sharon’s recently issued second generation, and runs Selina’s fingertips over the trigger guard. The full black polymer body makes Siri happy. The pistol weighs heavy in Selma’s small home manicured hand. Only here Simone allows for plastic entering Samantha’s life. Fake nails. But Sally prefers them classy, unflashy, almost ordinary.*

A rat is walking into a bar to debunk a joke. Coming from the Twilight Zone it is living between structures, inhabiting shade. A story within a story. We know that speaking out is never the end, but always a beginning. Replenishing the currency of information, it is followed by a process of questioning where people are mute, proof is lost and sources confused. It has consequences. Knowledge sinks in a fear-driven, conspiracy-led hysterical reality mainly building upon distorting communicative structures of mass-media. This is where a rat has always been an aggressor and vice versa: a stimulant. When sources are forever dislocated, what then belongs to this world?

She looked up into the pre twilight blue, the open sky waiting for reanimation lay desolate, no signs of life.
The reality of sharing information. It is not radical, it is only irrevocable, until the next overhaul. It is empty, and it is banal. It is publication. From now on assuredness can only exist in fiction. So, how does fiction prove the leaking violence? How is certainty proofed in fiction? Imagination is given a fresh start. Allegation, confession, revision and denial are plot points in a drama without punchlines, reduced to being content, informing us to enjoy the current of a now. Every act new as new. Allowance to believe again, until proven guilty.

A rat squeezes under the door, hastens away. Еyes move fast and follow it. Where there is one, there is hundreds. A rat draws attention, not to itself but to the conditions surrounding it. What if text and painting appropriate the logics of betrayal, which is both enabling and disabling at once; both agency and exposure, freedom and self-annihilation. In this exhibition text and painting are juxtaposed where text is an ink-drafted script on course linen, with a silky paisley design sewed to the back; a fore- and background folded against each other, meeting in between the structures, to form a narrative. And painting, all made during the bygone year, is small and abstract. Some more akin to landscapes, others as if they’d envy the crafted trophy board for its charming ornamental foliage; telling stories of nature’s need for secrets hidden in the thicket of discovery. The unravelling of their fabrication is taking place quite literally.

Curated by Viktoria Draganova.

*All citations taken from Vera Palme’s text on display at the exhibition.