How To Forget Your Past Fast
2023
How to Forget Your Past Fast is a visual study of the history of the transition from communism to democracy in Bulgaria: a time of chaos, liberation and corruption. This collage work overlays images of icons of pop-folk Bulgarian music, chalga, and photographs of the main Bulgarian communist monuments under Nikola Mihov*, from his book Forget Your Past. Very popular in the 1990s in Bulgaria, chalga music celebrated the new ideas born following the collapse of the Berlin wall, freedom and the glorified Western life. How to Forget Your Past Fast illustrates the inseparable connections between past and present, history and memory.
*This project was created in the framework of the project ReForget Your Past for which the photographer Nikola Milov invited more than 30 artists to intervene on his book How to Forget Your Past.
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With the support of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute
Portfolio
About the artist
Born in 1994, Martin Atanasov is a visual artist based in Sofia. He graduated at the FAMU in Prague in 2014 and mainly works in photographic book format. In recent years, he has developed projects in relation to visual anthropology, photography and books such as Nature Index, NUTRICULA/Impossible Actions and How to Forget Your Past.