Stefania Batoeva

Stefania Batoeva + Adriano Costa @ Emalin, Dec 3 – 17

2 December 2015

A joint exhibition between Stefania Batoeva and Adriano Costa, titled Tia Deth, is on at 50 Rochester Place in London’s Camden area, opening December 3 and running to 17.

As part of the itinerant series of shows organised by Leopold Thun and Jasmine Picot-Chapman called  Emalin, the exhibition follows the aforementioned artists’ collaborative work produced during a stay in “wooden shack” TwoHotel in Brazil.

The “artists’ guesthouse” was  constructed by Swiss artist Fabian Marti and is located in Piracanga ecovillage on the Bahia state coast. The work of the Bulgarian Batoeva and Brazilian Costa will be transferred to a 20th century garage in Camden.

See the FB event page for details.**

Stefania Batoeva @ Club Caligulahttps://www.aqnb.com/2015/06/19/club-caligula-2015-exhibition-photos/ (2015). Courtesy Supplement Gallery, London.
Stefania Batoeva @ Club Caligula (2015). Courtesy Supplement Gallery, London.

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Club Caligula (2015) exhibition photos

19 June 2015

What a group of artists intend in cushioning themselves under the calamitous umbrella of the Caligula name is open for discussion. He was not a man known for his military or intellectual prowess, nor his humanitarian leanings; he was excessive, giving his pet horse a marble stall equipped with an ivory manger, and brilliantly vindictive, assassinating the very people that helped put him into power within the year. Nonetheless, Club Caligula, Stefania Batoeva‘s recent curation at Supplement Gallery in London, has joined her with three other artists under the questionable patronage of the mad ruler, whose feats of waste and carnage during his short four-year reign led him to be the first Roman emperor to be assassinated.

The Sofia-born and London-based artist continued her busy year with the small group show, this time modifying the London art space and inviting three fellow artists to collaborate and contribute to the exhibition. The once-bare gallery was transformed into a kind of South Beach, if South Beach knew about minimalism: white vinyl covered the floors, which had been transformed into a dance floor, chrome bar stools stood as if waiting for customers to sip sugary cocktails, and the windows wore PVC covering to block out the imagined hot Miami sun.

Club Caligula (2015) exhibition view. Image courtesy Supplement.
Club Caligula (2015) exhibition view. Image courtesy Supplement.

On the walls, Batoeva displays a series of new paintings, her characteristic large-scale canvases swathed in colour, but brighter this time, bloodier. The paintings, who abstraction only shows the glimmers of bodies or scenes, nonetheless spell disaster—they are aggressive, hostile, illustrating battles won and lost and suffered. Joining Batoeva in the exhibition were three international artists. From Berlin (and sometimes Sweden), Batoeva had invited artist and musician Ilja Karilampi. For Club Caligula, Karilampi produced a dubplate mix ripped from his Downtown Ilja radio show on Berlin Community Radio. The mix, to be played throughout the exhibition, came with a collection of vinyl stickers created in collaboration with Batoeva and distributed in various corners of the art space, displaying lyrics, tags, logos, and rules.

Batoeva invited the two remaining artists, Leslie Kulesh and Isaac Lythgoe, from London, where both are based. Kulesh, who returned to her limited “technomadic” womenswear collection, Temporary Autonomous Girl (TAG), for inspiration had transformed the existing pillars of the gallery with padded, digitally printed, electro magnetic resistant fabric used in TAG, while Lythgoe presents a sliding door-like piece called with a mouthful of a title, ‘here he is a serious dog, a democratic dog, but he doesn’t think he’ll spend a lot of time at the party today’ (2015).

Exhibition photos, top right. 

Club Caligula ran at Supplement Gallery from April 3 to May 2, 2015.

Header image: Ilja Karilampi, ‘Espressen’ (2015). Courtesy Supplement.

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Stefania Batoeva + co. @ Supplement, Apr 2 – May 2

31 March 2015

London art space Supplement is bringing artist Stefania Batoeva, joined by three other artists, for Club Caligula on April 2.

Batoeva mostly works with painting, creating large-scale canvases swathed in colour, often running high on blues, whites, and greys. She is joined for Club Caligula by Swedish-born and Berlin-based artist Ilja Karilampi, who also runs a radio show on Berlin Community Radio.

The other two artists joining Batoeva are American-born and London-based artist Leslie Kulesh, and British artist Isaac Lythgoe.

See the exhibition page for details. **

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Got tortilla with Butter… @ Rod Barton, Nov 28 – Jan 17

27 November 2014

London’s Rod Barton gallery is hosting the Got Tortilla with Butter on Phone. Think it’s the End? group exhibition, running from November 28 to January 17.

Curated by artist Mikkel Carl and featuring a dozen different artists, the show works to answer the “delicate, perhaps metaphorical question” recently posed by the one and only Cher on Twitter. The participating artists – which include Ivana Basic, Anna-Sophie Berger, and Kate Steciw – are all “what may or may not simply be referred to as ‘female’ artists”, but the exhibition itself goes deeper than simply and randomly collecting artists with the ‘right’ anatomy, as so many exhibitions do.

Instead, it serves as an analysis, teasing apart the term “female” from the “so-called feminine aesthetics” and “politicized feminist positions” and, through the employment of a post-internet reality, collapsing the dichotomies that structure culture at large. The fact that this female-only exhibition is intentionally curated by a male artist adds another layer to this exploration of gender and equality in culture and in art. 

See the Rod Barton website for details. **

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