When I look at the image of Darth Vader in the sea, scooping up salt water waves with a Britta Filter, let me tell you what I see.

I see Daniel Bozhkov as a harbinger of the future and mediator with the past. This 15-sec video, later shown as a photograph, was broadcast among commercials on a Bulgarian TV channel in the prelapsarian world of 2000. But what was this piece “advertising” exactly? Perhaps it was a calling card for the artist-as-interventionist, an overt smuggler of content, in a world on the cusp of becoming its own science fiction.

Britta is the embodiment of global consumer capitalism after all. Plastic pitchers that go largely unused in homes worldwide, they work by using ‘activated carbon’ to improve taste, and an ‘ion-exchange resin’ which removes such things as trace elements of copper. The dream of clean running water, and for most of humanity’s time on earth it has been a dream (and still is for many), would seem to be in need of augmentation, improvement, filtering. 

Captured images rely on filters. TV and film has always involved quite a number of physical filters. These would be applied to both lights and lenses: they would be combined to create moods and visual atmosphere. These systems have not always worked for everyone: black skin for example was often poorly captured and portrayed. Kodak’s much maligned ‘Shirley’ cards which allowed users of Kodak film to adjust their settings and which dated from the 1950s, did nothing to help filter light choices in capturing black skin, the model Shirley being a pleasant if dazed-seeming white woman.

But Darth Vader Trying to Clean the Black Sea with a Brita Filter also makes me see myself in a funny hat with tattoos across my cheeks, pointed ears, and grinning happily. I think about sending this image to my friends. The very first photograph posted to Instagram by co-founder Kevin Systrom used a filter, the X-Pro II, and ever since the company has deployed countless filters for its millions of users to augment their reality, insert a visual screen between the You and the I. Body Dysmorphic Disorder is rife among owners of smartphones, meaning most people don’t like how they look naturally. Not unlike Mr Vader’s warrior suit that makes his life possible even after his own body was cut and disfigured beyond the ability to function on its own, filters are the new masks, new lungs, new post-human metabolic devices. 

To become Darth Vader in the year 2000 might have been Daniel Bozhkov’s way of deploying the magic at his disposal: the attempt to cross the filter-membrane between the world and the artist, a millennial reality that was about to be augmented but just didn’t know it yet. To collapse the tropes of received culture and consumerism into the unpredictability of nature was to become a fortune teller, a harbinger of the future. Only a real bad-ass villain can try to clean the polluted waters of the sea, which would seem, rather depressingly, to be physically beyond cleaning. 

Swimming pools - unlike the vast and life-threatening nature of the sea - have filters, although they are more active than the filter of Bozhkov’s Darth Vader and his Britta pitcher: pool filters both keep things out (one can, with some cringing, imagine band aids and hairballs, dead flies and lost toenails) while adding in material in the form of chemicals and other agents (a swimming pool is after all the smell and taste of chlorine, as much as the sea is the smell and taste of brine). 

Between the world and us strange creatures, exist countless filters of our own choosing. The absurdly impossible task of purifying the Black Sea by an anti-hero from a sci-fi fairy tale, minted in the canteens of Cold-War 1970s Hollywood, and impersonated by a smuggler artist armed with a Brita filter, is an even stranger choice - and a dubious filter - until we realize that this is an attempt to mend metaphorically what is in reality beyond repair. This brings to mind another work by Daniel Bozhkov from 2010: Moby Dick Republik for Perpetual Reconstitution and Rebuild, shown at the Queens Museum of Art in New York the same year. That time around, the membrane-as-a filter was a square hole in a glass wall that encased  a real-size plaster cast of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s Pieta. The viewers could only see a blurry and distorted white shadow of the sculpture behind the thick glass tiles, but they were also invited to reach through the hole and touch the smooth and milky-white surface; to experience the flow of the forms created by the Renaissance master. Moby Dick, the White Whale, has always been elusive and beyond grasp. 

Most recently, in 2019, we see Bozhkov with his work Weitermachen!, which has him reciting excerpts from Herbert Marcuse’s 1963 work One-Dimensional Man at the philosopher’s grave in Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin. Here the artist is holding twelve carrots and a Kohlrabi (also known as a German turnip), as if reading the text to them, ‘astride of a grave’, extolling like a Beckett character the late philosopher’s ‘great refusal’ in the face of late capitalist consumerist and mass media culture. The name of the work is taken from the embodied absence of Marcuse’s gravestone, upon which is engraved the imperative: weitermachen! - keep going! 

I can't go on. I'll go on: there’s a constant negotiation to conduct in life between the individual and society at large. Keep going! - don’t block the membrane - this parsed and partial phenomenology that Bozhkov employs is a fact of life, one that reminds us of the parable of the blind men and the elephant who have to trust each other’s partial take on a grander, mysterious, and unknowable world. 

And more often than not, the filters of the future that Bozhkov uses are about addition rather than subtraction, or rather they are absurdist rather than functional. They show the urge for crossing the boundaries we create that separate the real from the metaphorical, the spiritual from the physical, urban myths from misguided conspiracy: they reuse mass cultural stereotypes to pop their own ubiquitous and ossified filter bubbles.