Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia.

Traditionally, equestrian statues are monuments representing a rider mounted on a horse. The term derives from the Latin eques, meaning ‘knight’, from equus, meaning ‘horse’. They typically portrayed kings or emperors and, from the Renaissance era, military commanders. The removal of those subjects, or the so-called heroes, leaving empty or unfinished pedestals, illustrates how dealing with memory remains infinitely open-ended.

The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters.

We live in a time of polarisation, where many monuments are falling while others are protected by pillows in times of war. ‘Anyone can be a statue, but for this, your life needs to matter’, wrote philosopher Paul B. Preciado in response to the iconoclastic gestures of colonising figures across Europe and the UK since 2020. Whose life really matters, or whose life matters more than the lives of others?—these are the major questions that have defined the global political agenda, particularly in the past two decades.

These dilemmas become the subjects of reflection in Lachezar Boyadjiev’s extensive cycle of artistically and digitally manipulated photographs from which human figures have been removed from the public equestrian statues in Bulgaria, various European countries, and around the world. The artistically erased subjects in the works are predominantly male political leaders implicated in colonial conquest of the world, and historical characters, military commanders and members of imperial families, all depicted heroically riding their high horses somewhere ‘up there’. At the time of the conception of this exhibition, the artist’s collection consisted of about 120 monuments. The goal was to reach over 500 (although including all of them in the physical space of three of the galleries in Kvadrat 500 is practically impossible) with the collaboration and assistance of researchers, colleagues, and activists in the respective countries, and even open-source internet data and shared Creative Commons files.

In arranging such a large number of graphic prints with similar themes, we rely more on the massive presence of this ‘corpus’ of works than on the cognitive side of each monument. The latter is compensated by the inscriptions on the individual prints, as well as by the possibility for any visitor with a smartphone and internet access to use the main information resource from which the artist has accumulated examples from all over the world.

The cycle is displayed in a way that evidentiary material is demonstrated in forensics and is reminiscent of how, in analogue studios of the past, photographic prints were hung up to dry. The installation is inspired by both the early 19th-century salons—an innovation that gave rise to contemporary art exhibitions—and by the investigative gaze of the ‘forensic scientist’ to enhance the specific humour of the presentation. In addition to the artist’s old and new photographs, the process of procuring photos was joined by colleagues and friends, and friends of friends and, recently, anyone who liked both the idea and the process. The names of artists, writers, activists, and historians who are interested in the pluralising of today’s public sphere in a decolonial manner will be respectively credited. They helped us gather visual material from their local contexts or, sometimes, with the aid of open-access internet databases.

The American scholar Michael Rothberg, a potential contributor to our future catalogue (now in preparation), addresses those questions in his book, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2009). How can we relate the histories of the victimisation of different social groups, especially in these polarised times? How can we avoid a situation where one commemoration is a denial of another—something we see all too often in the current global political landscape? In an extensive, complex and, at the same time, visually appealing project, Lachezar Boyadjiev proposes thinking of collective memory from a multidirectional and non-competitive perspective, creating a step towards an intersectoral and collective public sphere where monuments are counter-monumental. And the horses? They also need a vacation and, even more so, self-determination and anti-domestication soon in a planetary public realm to which art encourages us to strive.

The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.

(Text by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators)