Market of Desire: Women’s Market

Artists: Stefania Batoeva, Tzvetomira Borisova, Liz Elton, Hoa Dung Clerget, Vikenti Komitski, Stéphen Loye, Lazar Lyutakov, Ivan Moudov, Laurane Fahrni, Amikam Toren, Charlie Warde The exhibition features a selection of artists from PUNTA and Cable Depot galleries who present works inspired by the context of the Women's Market in Sofia. "Market of Desire: Women's Market” deals with a wide range of topics - capitalist realism and its impact on traditional culture and communities, shops as a mirror of the times and the longings of the people who inhabit it, but also the market as part of the ecology of the city. Happening in a former fish shop, second-hand clothes shop and now gallery, the exhibition will consider shops and their windows as mechanisms for creating imagination linked to the collective dreaming of a city. The first part of the opening exhibition is a site-specific performance by Ivan Moudov in the new space of PUNTA. With it, the artist intervenes in the architectural integrity of the gallery, laying the foundations for the debut, group exhibition (and all the others) by building for the gallery a concrete floor and signing it. In his work, Moudov addresses the constituent elements of the white cube, where " the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of aesthetics" (O'Doherty). In an attempt to achieve all these qualities simultaneously, the performance explores the potential of the artistic gesture to transform a former shop into a gallery. __ The exhibition thinks of the market and shops as mechanisms for creating desires and dreams. On the one hand, there is a direct link between the formation of identity and the market - we define and communicate ourselves in society through the possession of certain products and brands. Products and services on the market are often loaded with symbolic meanings; they are, among other things, a commodified way of accessing the 'celestial' but also of exercising control over the physical world. The objects that surround us serve as the fulcrums of our being because of their relative permanence, or at least a permanence that has been a quality of theirs until recently. The increasingly short lifespan of the objects of the material world leads to uncertainty and anxiety - so characteristic of the present - it is as if they radiate within themselves the fragility of being. Through the contemplation of goods in shops and fantasies of what would happen if we owned them, we create imaginary narratives for our lives. Once achieved, however, any desire system, even an intangible one, breaks down, and hence our motivation to be active in any direction, to make efforts, to strive towards something. This is why the desire to possess often remains latent; we prevent ourselves from attaining the object of desire, lest we make it part of our earthly experience and turn it impure. In this sense, the conflict between longing and our own mechanisms of sabotage are a major driving force in the market of desire. The market of desire shapes the world we live in and the way we choose to construct it. One generation's trauma, provoked by market failures, is integral to the political and civic decisions it makes, in the same way that the wants of the next generation lead it to take other, diametrically different positions. In the context of the current global geopolitical, environmental and social crises, all these issues take on new vitality. It is art, we hope, that will mediate these problems, that will serve as a facilitator for new readings of global processes that have their manifestations everywhere, including in the Women's Market where we find ourselves today.