Cosmos Cinema, 48 Gladstone st.
* Тhe exhibition will be opened for visitors in the period September 25th-27th, 2 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Built in 1964 during the Soviet period in Plovdiv, the Cosmos Cinema closed in 1999. It was the site of 35 years of projection of films and ideology and is thus a reflection of the political and social history of the country before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The rationalist building (architect: Lyubomir Shinkov), expresses both monumentality and an idea of the future contained in the former Eastern bloc.
“La couleur du Cosmos” is a quest focused on the building and the ideology of the Cosmos. Following extensive research on-site in 2015, Maxime Bondu wanders among possible images of the Cosmos. In search of the invisible, he found traces in a few fragments of paint fallen from the ceiling, in the cobwebs in the flooded basement, in a programme stained with ink and also in his attempts at deducing the persistent colour of the screen, that is to say the dominant colour achieved by superimposing photograms of each of the hundreds of films shown at the cinema. He worked with Julien Griffit to have the films analyzed by an algorithm developed for the occasion. After two weeks of calculation, a server network returned #282320, a hexadecimal code specifying a colour. Transferred to 35mm film and shown in a loop, it was found to be extremely difficult to project because of its dark shade.
Maxime Bondu (*1985, Paris region, lives and works near Geneva) studied Art History and Archeology at the University of Marne-La-Vallée and then graduated in 2009 at the Fine Art school of Brest. Represented by Jérôme Poggi Gallery, his work has been recently shown at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2015), Halle Nord (Geneva, 2015) at the MAMAC (Nice, FR, 2014), Mains d’Oeuvres (Saint-Ouen, FR, 2014), Maison Populaire of Montreuil (FR, 2014), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2013), Centre d’Art of Neuchâtel (CH, 2013), Ferme du Buisson (FR, 2013), Villa du Parc (FR, 2012) and at the Magasin of Grenoble (FR, 2010) among others. He works also on several collective projects as the Monstrare Camp, a community experiment for Art research and production into a cave site of 30 000m2 in Dampierre-sur-Loire (FR) and develops Bermuda, a mutualized atelier project at the French-Swiss border.
Émile Ouroumov (*1979, Plovdiv, lives in Paris) studied Visual Arts followed by a Master in Curatorial Studies (Paris 1 University, 2009). He has assisted the curators Pierre Bal-Blanc and Hans Ulrich Obrist and has also gained experience at MAMVP (Paris), gb agency (Paris) and MAMCO (Geneva). He has curated or co-curated various exhibitions, such as “Tension Economy” (CAC Parc Saint Léger, 2016, France); “Theatre of Operations” (Théâtre de l’Usine, Geneva, 2015); “The Galápagos Principle” (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013); “There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer” (2012, CAC Villa du Parc, France). His current research and prospective interests include the political nature of exhibition spaces, the porosity between the roles of the curator and the artist, the unstable formats of curating, the relationship between language and art and the paratext accompanying contemporary art exhibitions such as critical writing and press releases.
Supported by Institute Francais de Bulgarie and NCF.