FRIDAY, 2 DECEMBER 2022 AT 18:00 TO 19:30
ATON IN DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS - exhibition by Andrey Yanev and Miroslav Dachev
Kapana Gallery

On 02 December at 6 pm prof. Aksinia Djurova will open the exhibition "Mount Athos in drawings and fountain prints" by Andrey Yanev and Miroslav Dachev at Kapana Gallery.
After the opening, Prof. Dr. Maria Schniter will present the album to the exhibition and the books from the series "Athoniada" - the fruit of Miroslav Dachev's many years of research.
The exhibition will be on display until Christmas.
After almost ten years of pilgrimage and research trips to Mount Athos, in 2012. Miroslav Dachev and Andrei Yanev decided to realize a series of joint exhibitions dedicated to the Holy Mountain. Thus was born the project "Mount Athos in drawings and photographs", a title that clearly expresses the techniques of display and the dialogue between the two artists. The beginning was in September 2012 in Burgas. It was followed by two exhibitions in Sofia, Tutrakan, Gotse Delchev, Vratsa, Troyan Monastery, Vidin, Zlatograd. Each subsequent exhibition includes photographs and drawings that have not been shown before. And so until 2022, when several anniversary exhibitions were held in Sofia, Burgas, Gotse Delchev and now in Plovdiv. Behind the apparent tenth anniversary of "Athos in Drawings and Photographs" lies another - ten years since the establishment of the Centre for Semiotic and Cultural Studies. A centre of which Miroslav Dachev and Andrey Yanev, together with a group of like-minded people, are founders; a centre that has been making their every contact with the Holy Mountain a reality since 2012.
The photographs and drawings are the fruit of more than 50 expeditions to St. George's of varying duration (some up to a week, others longer), each year within two decades. This means repeated presence in all the monasteries of St. Gogar and in most of the monastic republic's convents and cells. It also means getting a feel for the Holy Mountain, getting closer to its true essence. That is why the selected works in the series of exhibitions over the years do not just show, but express: the inner sense of Mount Athos that their senses have captured and built up during this stay of over a year there, combining pilgrimage with the creative and research impulse. Behind the silhouettes of the holy monasteries, frozen on the surface of some of the drawings and photographs, lie not geographical but spiritual territories. That is where the daily life of the Holy Mountain takes place, and that is where liturgical time takes place - these two different rhythms, and in fact one and the same, are the focus of a good part of the drawings and photographs. In this sense, the exhibitions have always also revealed genre situations from the life of the monks - visibly in the portrait and reportage photographs of litanies, liturgies and pilgrimages, invisibly behind the tucked walls of the cell "Worthy Est", the skete "St. Andrew", or behind the proud postures of the monasteries "Great Laura", "Vatoped", "Pantokrator", "Simonopetra" and "Zograf".
The drawings and photographs from the exhibitions over the years have been put together in an album which will be presented during the anniversary exhibition in Plovdiv. The message is that the Centre for Cultural and Semiotic Studies is not just trying to introduce the Holy Mountain - Mount Athos, but to prepare the viewer for a personal spiritual communication with its vast and intimate spaces. Inasmuch as each successive exhibition is an invitation to a journey during which the senses can feel and commune with this spirit, this album is a cartography of their spiritual journeys over the years, to which everyone can become privy. Athos is not in the drawings and photographs, but standing behind them, it can be sought, discovered and made part of our salvation-seeking self. In strenuous days such as those in which we live, we increasingly need this spiritual self-knowledge and salvation.

For more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/1133180447565853