Dante and Visions of the Afterlife among the South Slavs

7-18 December 2021

Academia Gallery, 1 Shipka Street, Sofia

Vernissage: 7 December (Tuesday), 6:00pm

Curators: Aksinia Dzhurova & Plamen Petrov

Academia Gallery at the National Academy of Art hosts the exhibition "Dante and Visions of Afterlife among the South Slavs", courtesy of the Italian Cultural Institute, Prof. Ivan Duychev Centre for Slavic-Byzantine Studies, Elena and Ivan Duychevi Foundation and Graphicart Gallery.

Participants in the exhibition are the artists Emanuela Kovach, Dimo ​​Kolibarov, Zhivko Mutafchiev, Onnik Karanfilyan, Branko Nikolov, Lyudmil Georgiev, Vasil Kolev - Vassillo and Veselin Damyanov - Ves, who dedicated to the text and the figure of Dante created their own plastic narratives of their impressions from that responsible meeting.

So, seven centuries after Dante's death, a palette of images unfolded before us by prominent masters of graphic art in Bulgaria, which takes us back to the archetypal concepts about the universe and eternal fears and hopes for salvation; concepts that continue to mark our own modernity, despite our super-digital and unimaginative present; concepts that we seem to need more and more, so that we can return to ourselves in our communion with the Demiurge.

The exhibition project is one of the events related to the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death and is a significant example of the intercultural relations between Italy and Bulgaria. Dante's Divine Comedy does not simply metaphorically recreate the eternal existential human journey from life through death to eternal life, codified by the Christian religion as the path to knowledge of God and salvation. "Divine Comedy", conceived and constructed as a universe of divine harmony with its three components - Hell, Purgatory and Heaven - illustrates the hesitations and quests of the human spirit, which found its immortality in eternal and pure love. This medieval work, as modern as it is, has fascinated its readers for centuries with the extraordinary raw beauty of its artistic realities and despite its organic connection with the world of Western Christian metaphysics, it has woven into its literary fabric a line of mysticism well-known to the Orthodox world as well. "Divine Comedy" is a monumental vision of man and his place in God's universe, his ability to "read" the enigma of Creation and to penetrate the secrets of the universe, say the curators of the exhibition.

According to the manager of the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, Ms. Verena Vittur, “Dante is one of the figures who has had the greatest influence on Italian and European culture and literature. His journey to the afterlife contains many metaphorical and symbolic meanings related to "souls in different states, from all ages and of all origins, and we find different points of contact with the vision of the afterlife presented by the South Slavs."

Indeed, Divine Comedy is similar in design and plot to the dozens of apocryphal visions of afterlife travel known in the South Slavic Middle Ages. The apocryphal visions were a productive literary genre, representing journeys to the afterlife - to the seven heavens, hell and paradise. They develop a fabled real bodily transference into the transcendent world of God and the angels in heaven and of devils and Satan in hell.

Valid "green" certificates are required for access to the exhibition facility in compliance with the measures, adopted by the Ministry of Health.

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