K.

"With this project Kosta Tonev returns to the Bulgarian scene after an extended break. The exhibition closes a work trilogy consisting of some of his early projects, through the addition of his most recent work.

In this series Kosta Tonev acquires new identities by employing a set of protocols for verification used in the issuance of official identity documents. The identity document has the ability to restore in reverse the information about an individual, however only as far as certain aspects of it can be classified. The artist intervenes in this particular procedure conducting a series of subversive acts, and thus rendering a new persona.

His subsequent step is to restore the physical identity of Kosta Tonev altogether. The person produced in this automatized and inanimate manner of registration presents the viewer with a descriptive shell of a persona. What Kosta Tonev produces is precisely this shell – his own mimetic form, transformed so slightly that one could register the difference only in the presence of the original.”

Vera Mlechevska