HORNU.- Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov began his career in the 1980s, after studying mural painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, and then training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (HISK) in 1986.

He emerged onto the art scene in a tense socio-political context, Bulgaria being at the time under the influence of the Soviet regime. Very early on, he adopted a critical stance towards this regime, an attitude which he has maintained throughout his career by regularly addressing contemporary political and social issues.

Writing and storytelling occupy a central place in his work. Through text, Solakov infuses his works and installations with irony and humour imbued with gentle sarcasm and self-mockery.

A multidisciplinary visual artist, he explores the polysemy of language and ideas, playing with a multiplicity of supports and materials. His visual language, at first appearance naïve, in fact, conceals a complex practice, at once committed, poetic and playful.

With A Cornered Solo Show, Nedko Solakov has, since 2021, been installing his creations in the discreet corners of museums – often neglected passageways such as halls, stairwells or changing rooms. He arranges drawings, paintings, collages and handwritten texts, playing with the walls and their angles to create a form of marginal exhibition, engendering a dialogue of complicity between his work, the place and the visitors. His interventions address current issues – wars, ecology, institutional absurdities, and museum crises – in a tone that mixes sarcasm and personal reflections. By investing these ‘corners’, he transforms the periphery into an introspective, critical space.

For this sixth part of the series, the exhibition The Miner’s Dream is inspired by the stories and hopes that have traversed the Grand-Hornu site.

A Cornered Solo Show #6 evokes the reverie of a miner, his contemplative dream at the top of a mountain, surrounded by his family. This daydream provides him with strength to work and feeds his desire for a peaceful, contemplative existence. This figure embodies both the endless cycle of hard labour and the vital dependence on it to ensure the survival of his family. Like Sisyphus, he exhausts himself tirelessly in a repetitive task, the exit from which seems to be constantly postponed, generating an allegory of work as a necessity, a burden and a driving force of hope.

Before his intervention at the MACS, five institutions had already hosted an installation from the series: the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg (MUDAM), the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (MAXXI), the Belvedere in Vienna, the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Sofia, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest.

The Miner’s Dream
By Nedko Solakov

There was this miner who was working hard to provide for his family. Sometimes when he went down the shaft, packed in the elevator cage with his fellow miners, he would fall asleep for just a few seconds and would always have this dream – that he was suddenly with his family on the top of that beautiful mountain, which was as high as the depth of the deepest shaft of his mine and, of course, the mountain was much higher than that hill known as “the highest mountain in the whole of Belgium”, which was only 694 meters; and that much-higher mountain was so beautiful in his dream, especially when the light changed it – from morning mountain to afternoon mountain and then to sunset mountain and then to twilight mountain and then to moonlit nighttime mountain and back to dawn mountain. Thanks to that dream, which lasted only a few seconds, he had the strength to work hard and to keep providing for his family, even though he felt a bit isolated, as he was always being squeezed into the corner of that tiny elevator cage by his fellow workers (one day, quite naively, he shared his dream with them).

If the curator would give carte blanche, I can move this heartbreaking story into one of the big exhibition rooms, but for the time being, it seems, it will remain here, cornered.

This text, handwritten by the artist on the wall, is part of the installation.