Doomscrolling

There could hardly be a more fitting moment for this exhibition. For weeks, our consciousness has been completely consumed by news of murders and suicides, sinister conspiracies, conflicts, and apocalyptic omens. Tension fills every breath we take.

Social media algorithms, tuned to capture and amplify extreme opinions and judgments, have finally succeeded in creating a parallel reality in which uncertainty reigns. Doomscrolling is a term used to describe the specific state of prolonged, compulsive scrolling through online content of a negative, anxious, or catastrophic nature — an activity that increases stress, anxiety, and the feeling of helplessness.

For artists Alina Papazova and Sasho Violetov, working on this project is an opportunity to clearly formulate a problem. It is an answer to the question: how do we feel in this information trap? The conversation begins with sharing similar experiences — thoughts of lack of motivation, a diffuse sense of panic, fear, and despair. Where is the artist in this world, and can art be a saving way out — a possibility of leaving this fabricated digital reality?

Using ceramics, Alina creates figurative compositions that are at once childlike and ruthlessly contemporary. In them, she marks the paradoxes of online algorithms, which present shocking and "cute" information one after another, manipulating the viewer's emotions in an almost schizophrenic way. Her works borrow from the visual language of the first digital chats of the 1990s, and especially from The Palace (chat room), where avatars — memes immersed in dark or kitsch aesthetics — lead a life of their own. They construct a mirror reality with its own rules — a kind of ancestor of today's AI visuality.

In five paintings created especially for the project, Sasho Violetov conveys his personal anxiety, prompted by the development of social media and AI technologies. Borrowing motifs from mass culture and placing them in a surreal visual environment, he unfolds narratives connected through association. In these paintings, the artist does not take sides, but with marked irony uses figures that themselves enact enigmatic rules of a game.

In the context of Doomscrolling, the two artists together build a shared visual field. In large-format painted canvases descending from the ceiling, an idyllic landscape unfolds. It is, to a greater or lesser extent, a cliché — an avatar of reality, composed of sky, land, and palm trees.

– Vessela Nozharova