Solo Exhibition at Museum of Humor and Satire
Curator: Reneta Georgieva
January 16 – February 16 2026
In the exhibition FANGIRL, Nevena Ekimova undertakes a personal and artistic gesture of return – to herself, to the past, to the men who inhabited it.
The project functions as a kind of emotional retrospective, in which the artist traces the threads of her feelings – attraction, idealization, shame, anger, sadness, ecstasy – towards figures from reality and fantasy, mostly male. It is an intimate but sharply ironic archive of her experiences as a woman and an artist, placed at the heart of fandom – this deeply feminine, often devalued, but also powerful form of identification and projection.
Having crossed the symbolic threshold of 40, Nevena unfolds her artistic language – drawing, sculpture, textiles, speech and music – to map the inner territory where archetypes and personal memories mix 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 she looked up to and fell in love with, who she was disappointed by and who she fantasized about.
The exhibition collects emotional trophies from experienced and untold stories, archives them visually, turning them into an intimate mythology.
FANGIRL is not just an exploration of the desires that the female point of view gives rise to – it is a frank admission of the artistic dependence on these desires, on fixation, on longing.
Something between a teenager’s diary and a mature artistic confession. Nevena allows herself to be both serious and self-ironic, vulnerable and controlling, a fan and an author – and it is precisely in this tension that her artistic maturity is revealed.
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.