Advanced Swedish for Beginners

April 16th - May 14th, 2005

Daniel Bozhkov is a Bulgarian-born artist based in New York City. In Advanced Swedish for Beginners, Bozhkov enters systems that inform how we construct contemporary life, inhabiting these usually closed and self-sufficient structures to explore the effects that working within them produces.

In 2000, he took the Wal-Mart staff-training course and worked as a People Greeter at the Wal-Mart in Skowhegan, Maine. In between shifts he painted a fresco in the Layaway Department of the store. The fresco withstood, and recorded, four years of merchandise maneuvering. Stacks of air conditioners, recliners and heavy shelving being moved in a hurry inevitably left deep abrasions. This accelerated archaeology is not regarded as decomposition, but a stage of the work¨s lifecycle.*

For this exhibition, in the video High Altitude, Bozhkov videotaped himself making a drawing with a permanent marker on the window of an airplane, 35,000 ft in the air. He traced the frost lines that had formed on the window and then desperately tried to erase the drawing. The attempt to transcend the boredom of flight and the exhilaration of high altitude turns into a panic and involuntary violation of public space and private property. In another drawing, Advanced Swedish for Beginners € Curtain, Bozhkov has collapsed IKEA furniture self-assembly instruction manuals, emergency flight evacuation instructions, and diagrams from "Kama Sutra for Dummies" to make "life-patterns" on a 10 foot by 20 foot curtain.

Tourist guides, emergency instructions and assembly diagrams constitute the transient utopianism of Advanced Swedish for Beginners: we are instructed to put together our new beds by following series of diagrams, and then to attempt Kama Sutra with our significant others by following another set of instructions.

Behind the curtain Bozhkov has constructed a "flight suite" of IKEA furniture complete with bed, bedside tables, lamps and armoires. At the center of this cluster of wood veneer and translucent plastic furniture, sits a TV with the bed acting as its pedestal. The television shows a video in which the artist and Sara Sjolund (a native Swedish speaker), closely pressed up against each other, recite the IKEA catalog in alphabetical order. They take turns reading the Swedish names and the English descriptions of each piece of furniture. She speaks "IKEAn" Swedish and he follows in English. Their onscreen presence is that of two incompatible news anchors, delivering their lines in a hypnotically repetitive tone.

Since 2003, Bozhkov has explored his interest in mediated experience through his project entitled Fastest Guided Tours. Bozhkov has led guided tours of Vilnius, Lithuania and Yellow Springs, Ohio. Upon arriving in a foreign city, he studies tourist guidebooks for a few hours, and then leads a 35-minute running tour of the city. Fastest Guided Tours of Prague, Krakow and Budapest are planned for this spring.

Daniel Bozhkov would like to thank Sara Sjolund for her very personal and generous collaboration with creating the Advanced Swedish for Beginners video. Advanced Swedish for Beginners will be on view from April 16th € May 14th, 2005. A reception will be held for the artist in the gallery on April 16th from 6 - 8 PM at 516A West 20th Street, New York City. For information call 212-741-8849.

* The Wal-Mart project (entitled Training in Assertive Hospitality), including the fresco and a video documentation, is currently on view at the Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos in the Bronx until May 18th, as part of Can I get a Witness, an exhibition curated by Dean Daderko.

Learn How to Fly Over a Very Large Larry

January 11-February 15, 2003

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Daniel Bozhkov's second solo exhibition Learn How to Fly Over a Very Large Larry. Daniel Bozhkov has been a participant in the International Studio Program of P.S.1 and was included in their exhibition Listening to New Voices. Bozhkov also had a solo exhibition, Sour Milk, at Parlor Projects in Brooklyn.

To create his work, Daniel Bozhkov uses the help of professionals from a variety of disciplines including genetic scientists, airplane pilots, clerics and media personalities. Learn How to Fly Over a Very Large Larry began as a ìcrop signî made by Bozhkov in a hayfield owned by Steve Liakos, near East Madison, Maine. Using string and a piece of plywood Bozhkov created an impression of the talk show host Larry King that measured 300 by 250 feet. Bozhkov then took flying lessons over the site for his first aerial view of the work. With the help of Liakos and Grace Jaqua, a local 911 emergency operator and self taught naturalist, Bozhkov was able to identify seven different plant species living inside the Larry King sign.

Bozhkov released news of the crop sign to the media to coincide with the release of the movie "Signs," in which Mel Gibson plays a farmer who copes with mysterious crop circles that appear in his cornfield. Every major television network, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the story of Bozhkovís piece.

CNN's Larry King, who hosts the first worldwide phone-in television talk show and the networkís highest rated program "Larry King Live," is in living rooms around the world. The show continues to make headlines with such high profile guests as Yasser Arafat, Tom Cruise, Michael Jordan and Tony Blair. In an interview with actor Mathew Perry on August 22, 2002 Larry King acknowledged his emblematic status by removing his trademark suspenders and then remarking on Bozhkov's crop sign as "the largest tribute I have ever received."

The exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery features a living room in which a large couch, stretched into perspective, allows for the comfortable viewing of five monitors. The monitors feature videos that weave together media coverage with documentary footage from the making of the crop sign and the flight over it. This "reality-show" slice of American culture is also represented in pressed plant herbariums displaying plants collected from the crop sign and several paintings made in the traditional early American method of egg-oil emulsion.

Learn How to Fly Over a Very Large Larry will be on view from January 11 - February 15, 2003. A reception will be held for the artist in the gallery on January 11 from 6-8 p.m. at 516 West 20th St., New York City. For information call 212-741-8849.