CULT

 

What is it that constantly pushes artist Iva Vacheva to the edge of excess?

Over the last ten years her artistic practice shows unambiguous obsession with radical states of body and soul, and the dissolution of mortal values. Her interests can be considered a critical comment about present-day morals, the excess of capitalism and the cult to consumerism.

Her work could even be seen as an incriminating gesture, a march against evil that exposes vice and settles a new sacred order of light. But there is more than that. Iva Vacheva’s work transcends the bare exercise of morality, existing somewhere between Christian values and disappointment in capitalism.  

The Cult series is a compilation of five images of a dissipated feast.

Women and men lift their glasses again and again, losing count of the toasts. Grotesque creatures with baroque wigs and decaying body parts, who have long forgotten who they are or what they are celebrating.

The five works in the series build a chronology of the apocalyptic celebration – from happiness to mad laughter, set against a background of destruction. The following story is a peculiar exploration of the feast. You may find in it apocalyptic visions, marked by either moralist inclinations or Marquis

de Sade’s touch. But most of all, Cult is an autopsy of the pleasure of life.

Iva Vacheva explores the topic of cultish feast, mirth and drunkenness as a way for people to get closer. In the joy of celebration all boundaries and differences vanish in order to become friendship beyond the sump of reality. As with the optimism of a drunk man, who does not notice the surrounding destruction and the bitter end, Iva Vacheva infects us with the ecstasy of the feast. The celebration brings us back to life beyond the stinky reality of pain and death.

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Text: Stefka Tzaneva