Filip Boyadjiev’s work “Clash, Cash, Lash” explores the notion of personal and collective identity through a speculative and psychological lens. Composed of three parts, the work approaches identity as a process, simultaneously measurable, experienced, and algorithmically constructed.

The first part is a geometric gouache “self-portrait” of the artist, generated through the Lüscher Color Test on the date of the exhibition opening. The image functions as a kind of psychological snapshot, a momentary imprint of an inner state, fixed in time.

The second part transforms the viewer from an observer into a participant. In a designated space, each visitor can take the same test and receive their results in the form of a receipt. This gesture introduces an economic metaphor in which psychological state becomes a measurable and “priced” unit. In doing so, the work problematizes the contemporary tendency toward the commodification of the individual, the idea that every personal characteristic, including psychological ones, can be converted into value.

The third aspect of the work expands this logic to a global scale. Through the algorithmic processing of data accumulated from all completed tests, a speculative forecast of the “psychological state of the world” is generated each day. Individual measurements are aggregated into a collective profile, raising the question of to what extent global identity can be reduced to a statistical model.

The choice of the Lüscher Color Test is not accidental. In the early 1990s, amid Bulgaria’s post-socialist transformation, the artist’s father established one of the country’s first recruitment consulting firms, where the test was used as an assessment tool. In this sense, the test functions not only as a method, but also as a biographical and cultural marker. Its repeated application at different stages of Boyadjiev’s life turns it into a participant in the construction of his identity.

“Clash, Cash, Lash” questions the boundaries between subjectivity and systems, between the inner world and the external mechanisms used to measure it. Rather than offering definitive answers, the work opens up a field of tension in which identity emerges simultaneously as personal experience, social construct, and economic resource.

photos: Kalin Serapionov

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