2003
various size
toys, barbed wire, wire, wood, metal
SOHO am Ottakring, international arts festival, Vienna, Austria

   I thing artists are born to rethink and redefine everyone for her/him self all established values. To break all rules, to construct one’s own individual system of priorities, values, hierarchies, meanings.

   At the same time deep in the unconscious there are stored genetically historical notions, mental pictures and concepts for right and wrong, fair and unjust, acceptable or not etc.

   I am trying to think over, to redefine, to find new formula and overturn my ideas for good and bad both as sensation or perception, and in their material expression.

   Between different religious and cultural traditions there are big gaps in the conceptions of commonly accepted or culpable, condemnable.

   Pleasures were mostly taken as secret, blamable, a very intimate territory. Often punished by the public opinion.

   But what could replace them? Nothing to compare with the satisfaction of love, friendship, work. But it sometimes transforms into pain, misery and torture. And after all the self control: each one of us has chosen the artistic activity for his / her lifetime – I do not never call it a profession or an occupation.

   In a series of small allegoric objects I’d like to analyze the symbols of good and bad, of pleasures and (self-)tortures. But the symbols of delight, extravagant and lavish as form are paint in gray, looking in a way neutral and drag. And the torture instruments, though made for such sinister purpose, are paint many-colored, patterned, cheerful.

   What are we allowed to define? And who defines us?

Elena Panayotova
28.11.2002