We continue our introduction of the artists in “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination” with the Bulgarian artists Maria Nalbantova and Antoni Rayzhekov, who are producing a collaborative work for the first time.
Maria Nalbantova (b. 1990, Sofia, Bulgaria) is a visual artist working across various media, including sculpture, DIY bio-materials, video, and drawing.
She creates mixed-media installations, often in dialogue with specific locations, engaging with their historical, socio-political, and ecological dimensions.
Nalbantova is one of the artists representing the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026.
Antoni Rayzhekov is a conceptual media artist, educator, and researcher, born in Sofia and living between Austria and Bulgaria since 2007.
He works at the intersection between sound and visual arts, computational arts, performance, and science.
Rayzhekov creates audio-visual installations, sound sculptures, interactive objects, body- and lecture-performances, where the audience is often actively involved.
For Polit-Pong, their first collaboration for the exhibition in Gabrovo, visitors are invited into a “brieftopian” experience in which a game of ping-pong triggers sounds with each strike—sometimes difficult or even impossible—composed of fragments of speech: exclamations, sighs, and inarticulate sounds of discomfort extracted from processed interviews with key figures from Bulgaria’s political and public life after 1989.
The project is realised with financial support from procedure BG-RRP-11.021, New Generation of Local Cultural Policies for Large Municipalities, Investment Development of Cultural and Creative Sectors, Component Social Inclusion, National Recovery and Resilience Plan.