RASSIM®
RASSIM®
(b. 1972, Orehovitsa, Bulgaria; lives and works in Sofia)
Corrections 2.
2002
Two-channel video with sound, 17’ 4’’ each
Courtesy of the artist
This work is a continuation of the performative series Corrections, the first part of which consisted of Krasimir Krastev (RASSIM®) altering his body over the course of two years through a bodybuilding and protein supplement regime. In the second part, the artist takes the viewer with him during a very intimate and culturally loaded operation: circumcision. The result of a conscious decision beyond religious or cultural imperatives with which RASSIM® does not associate himself, the gesture of permanently altering one’s body takes us back to the sacrificial rites or initiations that would psychologically (and socially) mark the passage to a different status. Referencing the multicultural nature of Bulgarian society, RASSIM seems to reject the often short-lived and easily reversible gestures of compromises undertaken for the sake of understanding and peace with the “other,” and instead becomes the other, slipping into a different body for life and paying the price in blood.
Many of the works made by RASSIM® in the 1990s, the decade when he came of age, deal with everyday reality in Bulgaria by literally trying out on the artist its most “visceral” human shapes: bodybuilders, boxers, junkies, muscular machos. In the two-channel video Corrections 2, however, we witness a different body of the artist—a passive, weak, and vulnerable body exposed in the most delicate process of transformation.
SK