Adelina Popnedeleva opened her solo exhibition at the National Gallery/Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art SAMCA in October 2018. The show, entitled Pink Light, is the third exhibition from Autobiography project of the museum program on documenting contemporary art. The exposition includes her early and emblematic works (installations, performances, and photographs) such as Symptom, Alchemy, Nirvana and many other new, created for the museum space pieces showing the changes and development of the medium as means of expression. Nevertheless, Popnedeleva acknowledges, when creating, one always reveals their attitude towards the world.

Pink Light deals with the female theme, her role in art in the past and present, as well as the social stereotypes around her. The exhibition is about the hopes, the high expectations, the disappointments, and failures. Popnedeleva comments on the idea behind the title in an interview for the Bulgarian National Radio, saying that it embodies the link between material and spiritual. “We associate the light with the spiritual, but according to contemporary notions of physics, it has a material character. Pink, on the other hand, is associated with the feminine, sweet, flesh, matter, erotic.” The color can be noticed on entering the hall, as well as the neon sigh, reading: “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”. The sentence is literally taken from the street – it was part of graffiti in Sofia, and the theme once again corresponds to the one in the exhibit. The piece itself is controversial, as Popnedeleva says, because the pink light gives some hope and positivity, it implies the idea for a new beginning, but all of this disappears when one reads the sentence – it puts us back on earth, assuring us that our expectations are too high. Commenting on the autobiographical element in the show, the author shared she had chosen pieces, which best characterize her and her creative work. She once again goes back to the hopes, mentioning a self-portrait where she is depicted as a 4-year-old child with a French textbook. The piece is about our vision and expectations of the future, which often are not met. To the question if she has changed as an artist since the 1990s, Popnedeleva confesses she is still interested in the same existential, psychological and social themes – the relations between people, with each other, the problem people face, the metamorphoses they go through. “I try to work between the ethics and aesthetics, while attempting to balance them”, says Popnedeleva. Another important element in the exhibition is time, with regards to the show being retrospective – it shows the author’s artistic development since the 1990s. It is felt in every piece, it is the very documentation. “By means of images, I try to situate the time, in which I have lived”, says the author, mentioning one of her latest works, entitled Dream, which can also be related to the theme of the whole show, i.e. the link between material and spiritual. The piece depicts butterflies around muddy puddles. For Popnedeleva the mud is a literal symbol of matter, while butterflies are associated with graciousness, beauty, perfection and even fragility. It turns out, those two things, that are incompatible at first sight, are sometimes connected in the same reality.

The exhibition at the SAMCA includes Popnedeleva’s early performance, such as Symptom, carried out at Irida gallery, with Ventsislav Zankov’s participation. In it she takes part in a public psycho therapeutic conversation, which, unlike theatre, is spontaneous, without rehearsals. In Symptom she didn’t know what she would be asked, nor did she know what her reactions would be. Exactly that makes her works so real, honest and humane. What is curious is that after that performance, the migraine she had been suffering from for 35 years was gone once and forever.    

The author recreates her performances in different contexts, with different elements – exactly because of the spontaneity they are never the same, there is always a moment of surprise. She is planning to make a performance in Vienna, which she hasn’t done for three years. It will be a part of an exhibition, dedicated to the famous Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Another key question concerning every artist is related to the audience – how it changes, how different it is now compared to the 1990s. “In the 1990s the performances were about the moment of surprise, the shock or provocation, while now the audience is more informed, expecting more. People have some expectation of what is to be seen. It is not always the artist who provokes, sometimes it is the other way around”, says Nadezhda Dzhakova, the curator of the exhibition. In her opining, nowadays it is harder for the viewer to be “shocked” by something and probably she is right. There are no boundaries today, one cannot shock or surprise easily, and every artist has done all kinds of thing to achieve popularity and fame.

How does Adelina Popnedeleva’s pink light feel like? Does it give fake promises or does it just show the present in a realistic way? Her exhibition deals with topics that are current and painful even today, and also reveals hidden metaphors. May be not everything is sugarcoated, sometimes there isn’t light at the end of the tunnel and there is no use putting on pink glasses. It is not easy to be up to date, but it is possible. Just don’t expect too much from the end of the world.

The exhibition Pink Light at the SAMCA can be seen until December 2, 2018.