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from Suzana Milevska review...
Kinds of Sights
The sense of sight, more precisely, the cultural determination of
the sight, as well as the problems of perception, are the basic
preoccupation of Atanas Botev in his latest project entitled
Kinds of Sights. He has started it in 2002 as a series of
graphic prints that were, primarily, researching the visual
qualities of different signs used in the tests for determining the
diopter. Gradually, the project Kinds of Sights grew into a
research project that resulted in certain paradoxical discoveries on
the visual culture.
With his interactive graphic prints Botev simulates a test for
determining the diopter. Concurrently, he introduces a made up test
with Cyrillic signs, since he finds out that, despite the fact that
the Cyrillic alphabet is our cultural differentia specifica,
such a test has never been used in the local ophthalmologic
examinations. The paradox that the ophthalmologic tests in Macedonia
still include Latin signs (despite the fact that the Cyrillic
letters have been created on the territory of Macedonia, in the 9th
century, by the Slavic educators Cyril and Methodius as the most
adequate sings for denoting the local language), provoked the artist
to reexamine this phenomenon.
Namely, all the possible misunderstandings that may arise from the
use of an alphabet that is not always completely mastered by the
local citizens incites disputes on the language and the cultural
hegemony of the past, thus revealing a hidden policy of power in an
apparently naive cultural failure.
The other works at the exhibition are graphic prints of simulated
ophthalmologic tests where the employment of different kinds of
alphabets or signs used to test illiterate patients and children or
introduction of tests the artist himself has come up with,
completely conclude the topic and the discourse background of the
project.
What all the graphic works (made in silk screen) have in common is
the fact that the artist invites the visitors of the exhibition to
test their own sights by marking on the floor the optimal distance
(6 meters) for determining any deviations of the sense of sight. So,
the question on the relation between the physiological and the
cultural determination of the sight and the perception in this
project helps the broadening of the field of graphic art and
directly includes the audience in the project.
Although he uses only the silk screen media, which in the age of
computer graphic seems a little obsolete, Atanas Botev's research of
the interactive possibilities and his mastering of the third
dimension (shown as early as his exhibition of 2000 at the Open
Graphic Studio) opens new interpretation possibilities of the medium
whose developing history has been determined and limited for a long
period of time only by the two dimensions of the graphic sheet.
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