DIS/HARMONIES Photographic exhibition of Ruth Koleva
DIS/HARMONIES Photographic exhibition of Ruth Koleva
Credo Bonum Gallery presents:
DIS/HARMONIES
Photographic exhibition of Ruth Koleva
5-23 April 2023
Opening: 5 April, 18:00 hrs.
With the photographic exhibition “Dis/Harmonies”, the singer Ruth Koleva demonstrates an unknown side of her creative interests. She first started taking photographs in 2004, when she was just 15, as a way to get backstage access to music events. Years later, during his education in Media and Communications in the Netherlands, she used photography to talk about social phenomena that attracted her attention. In recent years, Ruth has been photographing during occasional or purposeful trips. She often studies her objects in advance, searches for them, and sometimes improvises in strange situations, guided by intuition. She is not afraid of shortening the distance, of pointing her camera at the faces of strangers. Of starting a conversation. She does not direct or set the shots. It is life that arranges the images.
In the “Dis/Harmonies” exhibition, the photos were shot with digital and analog cameras. They were chosen among many, not because of the exoticism of the unknown destination (Vietnam, America, Mexico, Japan, etc.), but because in them, she recognized meaning and connection, she found strange analogies between various visual elements. Her photography is imbued with a sense of humor and of the hidden everyday absurdity.
The exhibition includes photographic series of sleeping passengers in the Japanese subway, of children in their natural environment, be it among the jungles of Laos, Vietnam, in the Roma neighborhood in Sliven or in a commune in Denmark. Colorful people participating in a Pride parade or just walking the streets of New York. Some of these characters are deliberately sought after careful research. This is how the shot of a Vietnamese musician without eyes was created. His image tells a story about the consequences of the Vietnam War after the use of chemical weapons.
Ruth Koleva captures the faces of ordinary people in seemingly everyday situations. Behind them is hidden a penetrating psychological look. It’s as if she herself manages to see beyond the photo the meaning of the life situation, to understand it and to reach what is most important – the person.
