Mihail Novakov captures this moment and calls it the “Sweet and Sour Hour”.
This is the moment of the ugly sour environment of rapid change, the moment of the sweet nap, a pause in which the line between object and subject is blurred because everything is intact creating one eclectic landscape. At this frozen moment, space bends and time almost stops. There is no action, no emotion, just the melancholy of expectation. In this found environment people become objects, and objects become sculptures: a piece of art in the lens of the photographer. Like the growing trend of slow food (as opposed to fast-food), in the world created by Mihail we stop, take a deep breath, and start over, this time consuming slowly, situation after situation. These are the moments that Mihail captures when he traveled to China.
We see the same stolen moments in the sour Bulgarian reality, where, as in the Asian scenes, the beauty of the absurd is no less present and the sweetness of the nap is the same. It is at this point that we can think about where we are going, what and whom we are catching up with and should we be in such a hurry? Or to bend into space and forget about everything, to steal this moment of melancholy for ourselves and capture its beauty.
Curator: Martina Stefanova