Solo Exhibition at Museum of Humor and Satire
Curator: Reneta Georgieva
January 16 – February 16 2026
Opening: Friday, January 16, 6 PM
In the exhibition FANGIRL, Nevena Ekimova embarks on a personal and artistic act of return – towards herself, her past, and the men who inhabited it.
The project unfolds as an emotional retrospection of a kind, with Nevena tracing the threads of her feelings – attraction, idealization, shame, anger, sorrow, elation – directed at figures drawn from reality and fantasy, predominantly men. What emerges is an intimate yet biting archive of her experiences as a woman and as an artist, rooted in the very core of fangirl obsession – a deeply feminine form of identification and projection, so often dismissed, yet charged with power.
Having crossed the symbolic threshold of her forties, Nevena unfolds her artistic language – drawing, sculpture, textiles, words, and music – to map the inner world where archetypes and personal memories mingle like souvenirs: from the father as the first object of adoration and psychological formation, through the fleeting idols of adolescence and adulthood, to the gallery of men and boys in whom she has seen herself mirrored, fallen in love, been let down, and fantasized about.
The exhibition assembles emotional trophies from stories lived and left untold, visually archiving them into an intimate mythology.
FANGIRL is not merely an exploration of the desires seen through a woman’s gaze – it is a candid confession of the artistic dependence on those desires, on fixation, on longing.
Here, fangirlism is neither a joke nor a diagnosis. It is a strategy – for resistance, for solace, for identification. The exhibition offers an emotionally charged yet conceptually grounded experience, in which the intimate autobiography transforms into a universally recognizable story – something between a teenage diary and a mature artistic confession. Nevena allows herself to be both serious and self-ironic, vulnerable and in control, fan and author – and it is precisely within this tension that her artistic maturity emerges.
Nevena Ekimova is a Bulgarian artist, currently based in her hometown of Gabrovo.
She studied contemporary art in Norway and Iceland, and got her BFA at the Valand Art Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Since 2021, Nevena Ekimova has been working at the Museum of Humor and Satire.
Besides participating in exhibitions, she often works with public institutions and creates large-scale interactive projects for children and adults.