Category: Briftopia

We continue our introduction of the artists in “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination” with the Albanian artist Armando Lulaj. 

Armando Lulaj (Tirana, 1980) is a writer of plays, texts on risk territories, filmmaker and producer of conflict images.

His research is orientated towards accentuating the border between economical power, fictional democracy, and social disparity in a global context.

His main topics of interest are the structure of power and institutional critique. In 2003 he founded the DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art, an independent art center based in Tirana.

For the exhibition, Lulaj will present part of his long-term project “The Deepest Sound” as a series of 224 photographs that provocatively invite us to view the world not as a system governed by power and economy, but as a whole without borders or nations—exactly as it appears from outer space.

As the artist notes, “art has always sought to imitate this possibility, even if only briefly and in miniature.”

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.

We begin our introduction of the artists in “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination” with the author of the concept itself — Behzad Khosravi Noori.

In this video, recorded during his second visit to Gabrovo (January 2026), Noori speaks about “Brieftopia” not as a utopia, but as a way of thinking: how art opens real possibilities for a tangible future — precisely at a moment when we are being told that no such future exists.

What else does he share? Watch to the end.

For the first laboratory in Gabrovo, Noori got inspired by the large number of caricatures and unique collages in the museum’s collection by Iranian cartoonist Kambiz Derambakhsh, as well as by childhood memories of watching the animations of Donyo Donev on Iranian national television. He will present his new film, Three and More Fools, shot within the museum. The film is narrated by the author in the form of a letter to his Iranian colleague, who will “receive” it posthumously, alluding also to the peculiar, brieftopian sensation one must have experienced when receiving mail at that time (something the collection of the museum is based upon historically), under conditions of political isolation.

Behzad Khosravi Noori, PhD, is an artist, writer, educator, playground builder, and “necromancer.” His research-based artistic practice includes film, installation, and archival inquiry. Khosravi Noori analyzes contemporary history in order to rethink memory beyond borders, examining the entanglements of misaligned collective memories. Through artistic research, he uses personal experience as a starting point to construct hypothetical links between individual memory and major world events, between micro- and macro-histories. His practice explores the margins of the artistic field within the broader contexts of art, transnational history, and global politics.

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.

“As a first step in a long and thorough process of preparation, the project unfolds the concept of Brieftopia (a brief utopia) in order to explore how, through art — that is, through imagination and critical thinking — we can resist the slow but systematic cancellation of the future. We want to believe the audience in Gabrovo will engage with and value these moments of hope.”

One of the key voices in “Brieftopia: Art Between Crises and Imagination”, Snejana Krasteva, (b. 1979, Plovdiv) is the curator of the project and co-curator of the 26th Gabrovo Biennial of Humour and Satire in Art (2029).

After many years of work and training in galleries and museums in Beijing, London, and Moscow, she has been living and working in Bulgaria since 2022.

In Sofia, she is a co-founder of the Eastern Balkans Institute for Art and Architecture.

In the coming weeks, we will also meet the artists who shape this “brief utopia”.

The project is implemented with the financial support of procedure BG-RRP-11.021 “A new generation of local cultural policies for large municipalities”, Investment “Development of the cultural and creative sectors”, Component “Social inclusion”, National Recovery and Resilience Plan.