MEETING POINT Anton Terziev. Psychotherapy

15 June 2004 - 30 June 2004

Anton Terziev’s video installation “Psychotherapy” deals with the inertia of everyday life and the lack of free human will in a consumer society.
The title is a tease with the determined way of life, providing man by means of repetition of routine actions with an illusion of the adequacy of his existence, turning him into a puppet of the system. 
The conformist character accepts the established rules of the game without trying to resist or change them in the name of a higher cause. 
In this work Anton Terziev investigates the process of personality deconstruction in a similar type of society. The individual’s free will that has become stunted seems to be a direct consequence or regularity, and in any case it is the easiest form of survival. 
At first glimpse Psychotherapy is a comic domestic story, concealing however a tragic existential problem. Anton uses allegorical but sharp language to describe the conflict or rather the horrific refusal of open conflict between the individual and the system. The videos are built up according to the black comedy principle, where nothing is what it seems.
Packaging plays an essential part in the installation. Boxes and labels appear as symbols of mass production, of consumer expendability, of multiplication, of consumer society, of dehumanization of art.
The motif of multiplication and serial circulation is implemented on artistic level by presenting the same genre scene in three versions, where the character at one time is the teller, next time is the personage and the third time is the watcher as well as by the incessant replaying of the story again and again. All of that directly corresponds with the feeling of a vicious circle, of the closed system, in which the character’s life is just a link in the chain. 

Yana Kostova