Luchezar Boyadjiev​

1957, Sofia, Bulgaria

GastARTbeiter, 2000–2007

digital print on fine-grain vinyl 

Luchezar Boyadjiev examines the relationship between art, economy, and everyday life by investigating the processes of creation and transfer of cultural and economic capital. In the capitalist operating system of art Boyadjiev is a valuable commodity, as he has received more than $100,000 in grants and other forms of “charitable” support for artists. Since none of this money ended up in the artist’s own pocket, benefiting his family for instance, he started to wonder who was actually benefiting from his work and whether the spending was justified.

GastARTbeiter is a type of personal chronicle which presents the monetary aspects of the life and work of Boyadjiev as an internationally recognized artist traveling all over the world, working on various shows and projects. It maps his career not in terms of exhibitions and solo projects at certain institutions, but rather through tracing the amount of money Western institutions and funding programs were prepared to spend on him and his career over a ten-year period. The work consists of various documentation—hotel bills, restaurant receipts, contracts, exhibition budgets—and includes fragments of his correspondence, photographs, and commentaries. By combining the German word “Gastarbeiter” (migrant worker) with the word “art” in the title of the work, Boyadjiev associates the status of a migrant worker with that of an artist: while the first is selling his ability to work to a foreign economy, the second is investing time and effort in creating cultural value in return for inadequate monetary reward. Boyadjiev thus points out that the capitalization of cultural value by the art institutions is based on the artist’s self-exploitation.