175 ARTWORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE HOUSE OF HUMOUR AND SATIRE/Gabrovo,2016

 

THE HUMOUR OF THE PEOPLES - 175 ARTWORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE HOUSE OF HUMOUR AND SATIRE

On the eve of the Humour Festival in Gabrovo and the Day of Bulgarian Education and Culture, the Museum HOUSE OF HUMOUR AND SATIRE presents to humour art fans its latest luxury publication.

The Humour of the Peoples album is dedicated to the 45th anniversary of the foundation of the House of Humour and Satire.

The publication showcases a tiny segment - only 175 artworks - of the core museum collection that numbers 33 234 humorous and satirical works by artists from all over the world. The work selection was done by an extended team of specialists at the House of Humour and Satire.

The art design is the work of Yordanka Shiyakova; Lyudmila Tsifudin and Galina Boneva have worked on the covers and the translation respectively.

The photography and pre-print have been done by Pixel Plus Ltd., Plovdiv.

The album is printed by Elit Press Company Ltd., Sofia. The Humour of the Peoples album is already available at the museum souvenir shop.
The book includes the marvellous essay "Laughter Is an Audiovisual Force" written in 1989 by Bulgarian satirist and honorary citizen of Gabrovo Radoy Ralin specially for the House of Humour and Satire.

The idea and the objective of the new representative album are succinctly but clearly oulined in the foreword by Mrs.Tatyana Tsankova, the long-standing director of the museum:
„Our team’s key criterion for selecting the works was the intensity of the emotion – the laughter they were able to evoke and provoke. We believe the selected artworks will awaken your sense of humour too, opening the floodgates of positive emotions and scraping off the accumulated negativity.

In this sense, the album can be taken as a kind of laughter therapy since laughter is a universal language of understanding.

But laughter can be equally prickly, like shards of a distorted mirror reflecting unsightly human vices and social evils.

They never cease to take us by surprise and to trigger the moral reaction of artists and ordinary people alike, for there is nothing as crushing as mockery.

It is capable of bringing down any dug-in “authority”.
The works in the album give compelling evidence of the talent and intellect of their creators; of their confidence and dignity that only free people possess; of their awareness of the mission to be at the helm of the movement for justice and humanism.
The Humour of the Peoples album is addressed to all who love laughing; however, it also coveys a message about how we perceive humour – the distorted mirror of the world. Humour should be everybody’s touchstone when it comes to choosing between good and bad, right and wrong.

Therefore, the album praises all those whose right to laugh and laugh at is actually the right to feel free.“