National Palace of Culture (NDK) Art Gallery - my strangest art gallery visit to date. And not just on this trip. My route to the NDK passed the Monument to the Bulgarian State, a decrepit and bizarre 1981 structure which was erected in a huge hurry and which started falling apart a few years later. Today, it looks like a horrifically infected tooth which should have been removed a long time ago. Bulgaria, it turns out, has a number of such former Communist monuments and buildings, including possibly most dramatically, Buzludzha, a congressional concrete UFO-shaped building which, like the Monument to the Bulgarian State, is falling to pieces. These rotting piles elicit differing emotions among Bulgarians; some view them wistfully, while others see them as unwelcome reminders of a dark past.
Anyway, back to Sofia. Thos Cook roundly sneers at the NDK, but does so unfairly; yes, the inappropriately, comically named ‘palace’ has more than a hint of the grotesque, but the brutal layout and vast, internal spaces are uncannily like the Barbican, which until relatively recently, was derided for being a boxy, noxious carbuncle. Besides, online sources (err, Wikipedia) praise the excellence of NDK’s theatre and concert spaces’ design and acoustics.
The Art Gallery was signposted from NDK’s front entrance, around the side and beyond into the gloom of an indoor market and through a dark cloakroom space, which again, felt very ‘Barbican’. At the back of the building was a staircase penetrating deeper into the gloom, from the ground floor into the bowels of the building. As I got to the bottom, I wondered whether or not the gallery was open. Everything was dark; both the gallery to the left and toilets to the right. In the time I took to pause at an unhysterical, diagrammatic ‘no guns’ sign, a well attired, well equipped security woman emerged, turned on the gallery lights and beckoned me.
The works were all by the same artist and good, if a little ‘samey’. The gallery wasn’t the biggest, so I was done fairly quickly and wondering where to go and what to do next. Was it raining outside? While standing, mulling these questions over and gaping at the last of the artworks, I became conscious of the security woman who’d crept and was standing very close to me. And, worse, she was fiddling around with her belt. Did she have a gun?
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