In images, symbols, fears and moral warnings preserved in the frescoes of Bulgarian medieval and Renaissance churches.
From May 20 to June 20, 2026, the Alley in Front of the Aula of NBU will host the exhibition “Sin” by the House of Humor and Satire in Gabrovo.
The exhibition presents scenes from the Last Judgment, the tolls of the soul and moral-didactic compositions in Bulgarian church painting from the 18th–19th centuries.
Through the images of sinners, demons, artisans, sorcerers and allegorical characters, the exhibition reveals how icon painters transformed painting not only into a religious image, but also into a means of moral education, social criticism and spiritual warning.
The exhibition draws attention to the rich visual language of Orthodox art, in which the fear of sin, the idea of retribution and the hope of salvation are intertwined with humor, the grotesque and clearly recognizable human images.
Speakers: Behzad K. Noori, Boris Buden, Edgar Schmitz, Michael Dutton, Magnus Bärtås, Maria Lind and Snejanka Mihaylova
Moderated by: Behzad K. Noori and Snejana Krasteva
Organized by: Museum of Humor and Satire, Gabrovo
Location: Library building, Technical University of Gabrovo, Hadji Dimitar Str N4
In preparation for the 26. Gabrovo Biennial of Humor and Satire in Art 2029, we invite you to take part in the 2-day transdisciplinary Symposium “Brieftopia: Archives of Futurity”.
The Symposium brings together artists, curators, scholars, and researchers from local and international contexts to collectively reflect on the concept of brieftopia, a term coined by Behzad K. Noori to describe fleeting yet tangible utopian moments that emerge within the connection between hope and hopelessness.
The Symposium will take place in relation to the exhibition that opened earlier this year, in March 2026, “Brieftopia: Art between Crisis and Imagination”, which explores hope as a fragile, paradoxical force that persists in direct connection to the imagination. Brieftopia proposes an archive of futurity as a brief moment when imagination and resistance encounter. The Symposium seeks to explore diverse notions of Brieftopian thinking and practices as a method of future investigation that resists monumentalisation.
The Symposium and the Exhibition together are the point of departure for planning the 2029 Gabrovo Biennale, curated by Snejana Krasteva and Behzad K. Noori, positioning Gabrovo as a site for experimental thought on imagination and the precarious politics of futurity. The both initiatives create a collective laboratory for rethinking futurity, and where Gabrovo becomes a site of practice of tangible future possibilities.
Download the Symposium brochure in PDF format >> here
IMPORTANT!
– The symposium will be conducted in English.
— Participation in the symposium is by registration only; space is limited.
– Travel expenses and accommodation are the responsibility of the participants. A preferential rate for accommodation at Hotel Etar (REMO Etar) has been arranged for the duration of the symposium. Please contact the email address below.
– If your plans change and you are unable to attend, please inform us promptly by email at exhibitiondesign@humorhouse.bg
With the support of the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Bulgaria
Symposium Program (*subject to change):
Saturday, May 23, 2026
(optional) *10:00–10:40 Curatorial tour of the exhibition “Brieftopia: Art Between Crises and Imagination” at the Museum of Humor and Satire
11:00–11:15 Arrival of guests at the library 11:15–11:20 Welcome by the Mayor, the Deputy Director of the Museum of Humor and Satire, and the moderators 11:20–12:00 Introduction and lecture by Behzad K. Noоri, “Brieftopia: Archives of Futurity” 12:00–12:40 Lecture by Boris Buden, “Can it laugh? Surviving with AI”
Coffee break 13:00–13:40 Presentation by Snejanka Mihaylova, “Diagonal Thinking” 13:40–14:40 Panel Discussion 1, followed by Q&A, moderated by Snejana Krasteva
Lunch 15:30–16:10 Presentation by Magnus Bärtås, “A Tower Taller Than Myself: a Brieftopian Experiment in a Prison”
16:10–17:50 Presentation by Maria Lind, “How far do we get with moments of magic?” 17:50–19:00 Panel Discussion 2, followed by Q&A, moderated by Behzad K. Noori
Sunday, May 24, 2026 10:00–10:15 Arrival of guests at the library 10:15–10:20 Introduction by the moderator 10:20–11:00 Presentation by Edgar Schmitz, “Trading in Brieftopia” 11:00–11:40 Presentation by Michael Dutton, “Moments of Communism” 11:40–12:40 Panel Discussion 3, followed by Q&A, moderated by Snezhana Krasteva Lunch and screening, followed by a discussion (Q&A) of the film essay “Brioni and Necromantic Theatre” by Behzad K. Noori and Magnus Bärtås 14:00–15:00 Symposium summary, discussion with all participants, followed by Q&A, moderated by Snezhana Krasteva and Behzad K. Noori Free program / organized visits to cultural landmarks in Gabrovo *(optional) Curatorial tour of the exhibition “Brieftopia: Art Between Crises and Imagination” at the Museum of Humor and Satire Visit to the Regional Center for Contemporary Art “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”, Gabrovo; meeting with the Director, Ms. Margarita Dorovska Visit to the Regional Ethnographic Open-Air Museum “Etar”
Synopsis of the lectures and short bio about the speakers (in order of presentations):
Behzad K. Noori, “Brieftopia: Archives of Futurity”
Brieftopia is a fleeting yet tangible encounter with futurity. It is persistence within exhaustion. In my talk, Noori will situate Brieftopia as both a concept and a method of thinking and practice that emerges from disillusionment yet refuses paralysis. Brieftopia is not an emotional retreat into nostalgia or a symbolic gesture, but a practice of surviving failure, a mode of living after defeat. Against the neoliberal capture of the future, where technology and consumption are framed as the primary vehicles of salvation and future, he proposes a critical interruption toward contemporary conditions that reduce futurity to repetition, a managed extension of the present, where imagination is replaced by purchasable images and speculative risk becomes the dominant temporal logic. Brieftopia emerges within this contraction as a counter-practice, proposing imagination as a lived, fragile, and collective act. Brieftopia is the final threshold before imagination turns real, yet it often passes unnoticed.
Behzad Khosravi Noori is an artist, writer, educator, and history-teller. His artistic practices include films, installations, and archival studies. His works investigate histories from the Global South, labour and the means of production, and histories of political relationships that have existed as a counter-narration to the East-West, North-South dichotomy. By bringing multiple subjects into his study, he explores possible correspondences seen through the lenses of contemporary art practice, proletarianism, subalternity, and the technology of image production. He examines contemporary history to revisit memories beyond borders, exploring the entanglements and non/aligned memories.
Boris Buden, “Can it laugh? Surviving with AI”
We don’t need to look much around to realize what a dire situation we are in: chaos, wars, environmental collapse … How to think of the future at a time when pure survival is at stake? Perhaps this is the moment to remember Walter Benjamin, who famously wrote that laughter is the only thing that helps us endure the abyss. He claimed, moreover, that there is no better starting point for thought than laughter.
As it is well known, artificial intelligence has become today an integral part of the reality in which we live. It is more than a new technological tool that might help us to survive. It is an agency supposedly able to think. But can it laugh? When asked directly, the AI answers: “If making a joke means ‘producing a text that causes a human to laugh,’ then yes. If it means ‘having a sense of humor or understanding why something is funny,’ the answer is currently no.” How to understand it, as a sign of hope, or rather of hopelessness?
Boris Buden is a writer, cultural theorist, and translator based in Berlin. Born in former Yugoslavia, he studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in cultural theory from Humboldt University in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1980s, Buden has published essays and books on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, politics, and contemporary art in Croatian, German, and English. He is a permanent fellow at The European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna and teaches at various universities in Europe. Recently published: Transition to Nowhere: Art in History After 1989, Berlin 2020.
Snejanka Mihaylova, “Diagonal Thinking”
Is it possible to think something anew, and under what conditions? Hannah Arendt poses this question in the preface to Between Past and Future, a book that serves as an important point of reference for Snezhanka Mihaylova’s lecture in the context of the notion of Brieftopia. The lecture begins with the idea of diagonal thinking, which considers time as a gap or interval.
In parallel, Mihaylova turns to one of her favorite texts by Paul Valéry, Eupalinos ou l’Architecte, a work situated between the creation of a concept and a theatrical play. Socrates and Phaedrus meet after the death of Socrates, or at the end of the time of their own lives, which they perceive as a flowing river. In the movement of the waters, lived experience is reflected through the prism of what has already been written — through Plato’s “Phaedrus”. Thinking emerges as a text within the text, or as an exploration of one’s own relation to the making of meaning. Valéry transforms the experience of understanding into a reversed flow of time, which can be explored as an architectural space.
In a further deviation, the lecture examines and juxtaposes this architectural space of reversed time through specific examples from the work of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando and the island of Naoshima in the Japanese archipelago — a place that has deeply captivated Mihaylova’s imagination. Approaching the subject in the form of a Brieftopic travelogue, the lecture reflects on questions of survival and the return to life after atomic catastrophe. Naoshima appears as an island where multiple scenarios for life after devastation come into being.
The lecture focuses on thinking as a creative practice. Through a series of gaps and deviations, it explores the possibility of art from the perspective of the future and the political promise contained within such a reversal.
Snejanka Mihaylova’s practice is grounded in performance and writing, as well as in long-term artistic research that approaches performance as a form of thinking and inquiry. Central to her work is the understanding that thinking is not solely internal or abstract, but emerges through relational, embodied, and acoustic experiences in acts of listening, voicing, and shared attention. In her recent work, Mihaylova develops the notion of thinking-in-assembly, a practice of collective thought that unfolds through co-presence, voicing, and attentive listening.
Magnus Bärtås, “A Tower Taller Than Myself: a Brieftopian experiment in a Prison”
The prison and the museum may appear as opposites. One is built to hide something, to separate us from something we don’t want to see; the other is built for visibility, to optimise visuality. Historically, these institutions arose at about the same time, and inside the key feature is common: the principle of observing. In the city of Kalmar, in the south of Sweden, there is only 500 meters between the two buildings, and the installation I created during six months together with six inmates establishes a relation between the prison’s confinement and the openness of the museum. The workshops at the prison included art presentations and discussions about crime and punishment, and we came to inspire each other in the construction of a meticulous work that materialises questions of power, surveillance, control, obsession, architecture, violence, and beauty. The whole situation that came about may be described as a brieftopia, a situation that, according to Behzad Khosravi Noori, can be compared with an intermezzo – a sudden opportunity to break a pattern and create something radically different. Brieftopia is driven by a utopian desire but rejects the placelessness that characterises utopian thinking. The work became a temporary refuge from reality and simultaneously something very real, a creation of a strange topography, a city of towers larger than ourselves.
Magnus Bärtås is an artist, writer, professor in fine arts, and head of research at Konstfack, working mainly with text, video, and installation. His dissertation in artistic research, You Told Me – Work stories and video essays, was presented in 2010 at the University of Gothenburg. Hewon the Grand Prize at the Oberhausen International Film Festival in 2010, and in 2024 he won, together with Behzad Khosravi Noori, the 1st prize of the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia at the same festival. His works have been shown at the Gwangju Biennial, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Göteborgs Konsthall, among other venues.
Maria Lind, “How far do we get with moments of magic?”
Curator, writer and educator Maria Lind will address the question of “How far do we get with moments of magic?” through presenting and discussing three projects with which she has been involved: The TV Trampoline: From Children’s Television to Contemporary Art and Literature in Moscow, Kalmar, Umeå, Norrtälje and Kiruna, The Silent University by artist Ahmet Ögut at Tensta konsthall in Stockholm and The Benevolent Food in Kiruna.
Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator from Stockholm. She is currently the director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiruna. From 2020 to 2023, she served as the counsellor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden, Moscow. She was the director of Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall 2011-18, the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010), and director of Iaspis in Stockholm (2005-2007). From 2002-2004, she was the director of Kunstverein München, and in 1998, co-curator of Europe’s itinerant biennial, Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg.
Edgar Schmitz, “Trading in Brieftopia”
When the here and now is so marked by depletion and erasure that it starts trembling under the pressures of its excessive futures, it tends to strike new bargains with the past and bring the dead back into the shared spaces of now, before and after. Like most future-oriented practices, necromancing animates present, past, and yet-to-be worlds into volatile patterns of exchange.
This is often framed as apocalyptic, but it isn’t in itself that exceptional. Most civilisations (have long had to) trade their futures with the claims of the dead, their gifts and demands, in ongoing negotiations that are culturally mediated, collectively ritualised and individually enacted. To shape and face the future without negotiating it with the past would simply be preposterous in most cases.
(All cultures and civilisations command technologies that allow for zones of contact with the not-now and the not-here in multiple directions. History and storytelling are technologies in this sense; film, love, and emancipatory politics are others, variously enfolding and morphing the temporalities and spacings of available present/ past/ future constellations until they offer up new ways of inhabiting worlds.)
Edgar Schmitz’s architectures, films, and soundtracks are concerned with developing modes of withdrawal, the dispersed materialities of the choreographic, and the temporal shapes of (in-)animacy. His work has been shown in solo presentations at Netwerk Aalst, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Cooper Gallery Dundee, FormContent and ICA, London, and has featured in A.C.A.D.E.M.Y at Van Abbemuseum, No Soul for Sale at Tate Modern, and the Hayward Gallery’s British Art Show 7, a.o. Schmitz is the founder of the CHOREOGRAPHIC and ANIMATE ASSEMBLY research clusters, curates the Choreographic Devices exhibition series and directs the Art Research Programme at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Michael Dutton, “Moments of Communism”
By shifting the analytical scale from macro-historical “modes of production” to the granular “moment,” this paper explores political life through energy expenditures that fall outside the calculative logic of both capitalism and traditional Marxism. While drawing on Georges Bataille’s recognition of energy flows beyond the working day, the text pivots from his rigid “homogeneous/heterogeneous” binary to employ the Daoist concept of qi (vital energy). This proposes a hydrodynamic ontology where energy is fluid and contoured by context rather than fixed categories.
This framework tracks the redirection of energy toward site-specific “islands of lived experience.” The paper identifies this shift through three manifestations: Otto von Busch’s “justice machine” as a site of collective ingenuity; Walter Benjamin’s passionate book collector, whose singular obsession decommodifies the object; and Michael Asher’s “Water Fountain,” which animates communal tradition through mundane utility. Dutton presents these as specific “agglutinations” that disrupt the technocratic turn in modern social thought, reclaiming the political as a fleeting energy found in the “bits and bobs” of communal life.
Michael Dutton is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. A founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies, his research uses the Chinese archive to challenge the technocratic turn in social theory. From urban street-life to his recent work on the “art of the political,” Dutton’s ‘art’ traces the affective flows through the de-intensifications of market desire through to the material intensities of the everyday. In his 2004 “The Book of Politics: China in Theory,” he follows energy flows from revolutionary kitsch to the Coldspot refrigerator.
Photo Exhibition by Veselin Borisev April 1 – June 30, 2026 Opening: April 1, 2026, 4:30 PM Floor 4, Hall 8
The author of Just Cats doesn’t describe himself as a cat lover. Yet, despite his preference for dogs, cats have always been part of his life. Today, he and his family share their home with two dogs and one cat.
Urban or rural, domestic or free‑roaming, black, white, or multicolored, lazy or restless, aloof or affectionate—no cat appears alone in the photographs of this exhibition. In every portrait, one senses the eye behind the lens: Veselin Borishev watching, observing, connecting. It feels like love.
The photographs in Just Cats belong to a larger, still-unshown project titled Pets and Other Species.
About the author
Veselin Borishev, a Bulgarian photographer born in 1967 and a graduate of Sofia’s National High School of Fine Arts, is renowned for his compelling fine art and photojournalistic work.
His artistry transitions between traditional film and digital photography, utilizing both black-and-white and color to explore varied, always conceptual themes. Rejecting stylistic boundaries, he engages in constant experimentation. His images convey a raw honesty, often brutally sincere.
The Museum of Humor and Satire presents: PUSTA VE4NOST / BLANK ETERNITY Exhibition by Filip Boyadzhiev
April 1 – June 30, 2026 Opening: April 1, 2026, 6:00 PM Floor 2, Giraffe Hall
The exhibition BLANK ETERNITY by visual artist Filip Boyadjiev explores the mechanisms through which contemporary social images transform into cultural mythologies. The project continues the line of theconTEMPORARY HEROES series, in which the author works with the figure of the so-called “traditional bulgarian man” – a character that is both familiar and hyperbolized, constructed from various layers of post-socialist culture. This figure emerges as a kind of hero of our time – a self-proclaimed patriot who builds his own symbolic universe from signs of status, power, and belonging.
The central element is a spatial installation composed of thousands of empty metal cans, forming a monumental environment reminiscent of a sanctuary. This space can be interpreted as a temple, built by the hero himself as an attempt to leave a trace and secure his presence in eternity.
The forced encounter between two cultural models – Bulgarian pseudo-patriotism and ancient Egyptian tradition – creates a distinctive clash. The archetype of eternity is refracted through the local context and turns into a grotesque form, where the desire for grandeur mixes with an element of absurdity. The temple that the hero constructs is both monument and stage set – a space in which the aspiration for immortality is marked by its own irony.
In the exhibition, the hero dissolves into a system of objects and symbols. Fragments of everyday life function as cultural markers that shape a visual vocabulary of a hybrid identity attempting to stand simultaneously in the past, present, and future. The black color covering the objects in the installation functions as a final gesture of intervention by the artist. The shine of the symbols is absorbed and neutralized; the objects become silhouettes devoid of individuality. Thus, the desire to shine turns into a gesture of self-extinguishing, the pursuit of greatness transforms into an image of one’s own emptiness, and the hero’s ego gradually becomes grotesque.
After its highly successful presentation in Sofia, the exhibition moves to Gabrovo – a city that, in the Bulgarian cultural context, is closely associated with traditions of humor, self-irony, and social critique. Presenting the project at the Museum of Humor and Satire creates a new context of the work, which is not simply a re-presentation of the exhibition but its conceptual continuation. The encounter between the project and the specific cultural environment of Gabrovo highlights the role of humor as a tool for critical thinking – the ability of society to recognize its own mythologies and question them.
The metal cans were provided with the kind assistance of Elena Tsvyatkova.
This project is realised with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture.
Humor has a curious ability: the more years it accumulates, the better it sees the weaknesses of the world.
On April 1st 2026, we celebrate 54 years since the founding of the Museum of Humor and Satire with a program full of art, games and the right to believe nothing.
Program
10:00 – 12:00 Children’s workshop “The Tailless April Fool’s Joke”, hall 8, for children from 5 to 10 years old.
11:00 Tour of the exhibition PUSTA VE4NOST with the author Filip Boyadzhiev, Giraffe Hall
13:00 – 15:00 “Fun quest ’26 (for the third time)” – a game for the whole family
15:00 Tour of the exhibition PUSTA VE4NOST with the author Filip Boyadzhiev, Giraffe Hall
16:30 Opening of the photo exhibition “Just Cats” by Vesselin Borishev, Hall 8
18:00 Opening of the exhibition “PUSTA VE4NOST” by the visual artist Filip Boyadzhiev.
Nationalism, pseudo-patriotism and 10,000 empty cans — dedicated to the “traditional man”, Giraffe Hall
Throughout the day you can also:
participate in the “True and False Facts About Cats” challenge
make your own Internet meme
draw inspired by the work of Boris Dimovski, Hall 4
leave your wish for the Museum birthday in the Guest Book
Entrance is free.
54 years is a wonderful age – wise enough to doubt the seriousness of the world, and young enough to laugh at it.
We are looking forward to celebrate our birthday with you!
Opening: 24.03.2026 at 1:30 p.m., Fourth floor, Museum of Humor and Satire
The exhibition “Structures in Transition” (24 March – 25 July 2026) is the culmination of the two‑month Curatorial School – an educational and practical program aimed at developing curatorial skills, critical thinking, and professional preparation in the field of visual arts.
Within the context of the Bulgarian art scene, curatorial work often remains ambiguous. The initiative of the Christo and Jeanne‑Claude Center in Gabrovo seeks to create a sustainable framework for learning, collective practice, and public presentation. The school gives its 18 participants an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration – an approach inspired by the combination of different kinds of knowledge and experience characteristic of Christo and Jeanne‑Claude’s projects.
Hosted by the Museum of Humor and Satire in Gabrovo, “Structures in Transition” is organized in three thematic sections, curated by three working groups mentored by Margarita Dorovska, Svetlana Kuyumjieva, and Vesela Nozharova. The participants also had the opportunity to consult with the lecturers Vasil Vidinski and Stanimir Stoyanov.
The exhibition includes works from the museum’s archive, brought into dialogue with the perspectives of young painters, contemporary artists, illustrators, and even photojournalists. The project explores the tension between the individual and society, revealing the many invisible ties and rules that connect them.
Its three sub‑themes are “The Queue,” “The Game,” and “Taming the Monument.”
“The Queue” examines a familiar social phenomenon that speaks volumes about different historical periods – their shortages, needs, and aspirations. A line of people waiting for something is a democratic and self‑regulating structure, yet it can easily become a monument to passivity or a vicious circle. Group “The Queue”: Ivana Borisova, Maria Borisheva, Yoshka Mihaylova, Iva Rudnikova, Krastina Stefanova, Emilia Stoeva
Taking as its starting point the local case of Chardafon in Gabrovo – a monument whose head was replaced by those in power more than once – “Taming the Monument” investigates the “beheading” of monuments both literally and metaphorically: as the end of an ideological narrative and as a process revealing public memory as a field of continual rewriting. Every monument has an ideological lifespan. Group “Taming the Monument”: Hristina Decheva, Martina Grueva, Ivelina Ivanova, Kalina Ivanova, Teodora Marinova, Marina Kisyova de Heus
“The Game” segment, inspired by Johan Huizinga’s concept of Homo Ludens (“the playing man”), looks at play not only as entertainment or an escape from reality but also as a fundamental principle through which a society understands, constructs, and resists the world. The works presented analyze the mechanisms of (dis)empowerment that shape our reality, leaving room for experimentation and a reconsideration of the rules by which we live. Group “The Game”: Paola Dimova, Aleksi Ivanov, Natalia Krisenko, Ekaterina Leondieva, Ralitsa Petkova, Ana Radkova, Elena Tsvyatkova
“Structures in Transition” runs until 25 July 2026 at the Museum of Humor and Satire in Gabrovo.
Participating artists: Zhenya Adamova, Velko Angelov, Zhivko Angelov, Ivo Bistrichki, Tsvetomira Borisova, Veselin Borishev, Lachezar Boyadjiev, Panayot Barnev, Anna Vasof, Alexander Valchev, Ivan Grigorov, Damyan Damyanov, Petra Dimitrova, Angelariy Dimitrov, Evgeni Dimitrov, Stefan Ikoga, Hristo Komarnitski, Veselin Kostadinov, Ivan Landzhev, Roxana Markova, Yoshka Mihaylova, Ivan Moudov, Stefan Nikolaev, Alina Papazova, Adrian Paci, Nia Pushkarova, Kamen Stoyanov, Isao Hashimoto, Veronika Tsekova, Valko Chobanov, Venelin Shurelov, Geri Georgieva
Curatorial School 2.0 is a project by the Christo and Jeanne‑Claude Center and Plakat Combinat Ltd., funded under procedure BG‑RRP‑11.021, Grant Scheme “New Generation of Local Cultural Policies for Major Municipalities,” Investment “Development of Cultural and Creative Sectors,” Component “Social Inclusion,” National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
First International Laboratory for the 26th Gabrovo Biennial of Humor and Satire in Art
Participating artists: Voin de Voin, Nevena Ekimova, Armando Lulaj, Ivan Moudov, Maria Nalbantova, Behzad K. Noori, Boryana Petkova, Antoni Rayzhekov, Lexi Fleurs, Luka Cvetković
Curator: Snejana Krasteva Museum of Humor and Satire, Gabrovo
The Museum of Humour and Satire presents the project “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination”, conceived as the first international laboratory leading toward the upcoming 26th edition of the Gabrovo Biennial of Humor and Satire in Art, to be held in 2029. The project takes the form of a group exhibition featuring newly commissioned works in a variety of formats—from performance and video to installations, seminars, and workshops—created specifically for the laboratory by international and Bulgarian artists.
The term “Brieftopia” is a neologism combining brief and utopia. Introduced by Iranian-Swedish artist and researcher Behzad K. Noori (a participating artist and co-curator of the next Gabrovo Biennial), it describes a fleeting yet powerful form of utopian imagination oriented toward an accessible and tangible future. As Noori writes, it is “a brief moment in which art intertwines with the politics of imagining plausible futures, in order to envision a tangible future that offers temporary refuge and potential paths for navigating existence.”
Brieftopia functions simultaneously as a critical working method and a research approach, drawing on one of the key hard-won privileges of contemporary art—its freedom—in order to resist what Mark Fisher has termed the “slow cancellation of the future.” According to Fisher, we live in an era in which everything can return from the past like a zombie, where cultural differences lose their specificity, and where the present stretches into an endless presentism marked by a pervasive sense of hopelessness toward the future.
Brieftopia, however, thrives precisely between hope and hopelessness—as a form of hopeless optimism. Art offers a space in which alternative models of co-existence can be tested on a small scale, where operations on time can be performed (stretching, compressing, looping, stopping, reversing, or fast-forwarding it), and where essential mental processes—abstract and concrete thinking alike—can be freely “practised” through bodily and sensory experience.
In the exhibition, the artists reflect on the concept of Brieftopia from multiple perspectives. At the very entrance, visitors are welcomed by Ivan Moudov’s work “Brieftopka”, in which the artist, with the help of a local speech therapist, attempts to read the curatorial text “in the Gabrovo accent”. The gesture reverses the conventional practice of seeking to “correct” an accent and instead proposes a conscious immersion in local speech specificities—even if this lasts only as long as a curatorial text does. In this way, the “ball” is thrown back to the curator, whose introduction and the very concept of Brieftopia become potentially more accessible to a local audience.
Language and speech are also central to “Polit-Pong”, a work by Antoni Rayzhekov and Maria Nalbantova, their first collaboration. 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.
In the interactive installation “Noise Floor”, Nevena Ekimova creates an environment for examining the informational “climate”—a device that registers momentary states of thought and oscillations between signal and noise, between critical stance and play. Luka Cvetković, in his installation “Celebrations 2029”, “reconstructs” the opening of the Gabrovo Biennial in 2029 and invites participants to “remember” imagined future states of the world, interwoven with personal narratives of love, family, success, and loss—raising the question of whether thinking the future is less a practice of prediction than one of memory.
Humour is a key tool and form of resistance in the exhibition, alongside imagination. The installation and live performance “Smile!” by Boryana Petkova affirms laughter as such an instrument, using female laughter—short, stifled, uncontrollable—as acoustic material to expose the moral and social control exerted over the body. The video work “I Hate War and War Hates Me” by Lexi Fleurs juxtaposes fragments of her visual communication with her fixer in Ukraine. Through them, we trace shifting emotional states—often with a comic effect—set against quiet, seemingly idyllic landscapes in which military operations are nevertheless unfolding. Meanwhile, Voin de Voin’s workshop “How Do We Organise Ourselves in Times of Chaos?” is oriented toward practical exercises aimed at cultivating skills necessary for regaining orientation and the capacity to act under conditions of instability.
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, Behzad K. Noori presents his new film, “Brieftopia, 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.
Armando Lulaj presents part of his long-term project “THE DEEEPEST 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.”
Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination marks the first step toward the 26th edition of the Gabrovo Biennial of Humour and Satire in Art, an established forum for contemporary art in Bulgaria and the region, to be curated by Snejana Krasteva and Behzad K. Noori. Through an open, multi-stage, and context-sensitive approach, the project aims to strengthen Gabrovo’s role as an active centre for contemporary art and international cultural exchange. The laboratory will include a series of events, tours, and workshops, as well as a two-day international symposium on 23–24 May 2026, featuring distinguished speakers such as philosopher Boris Buden, political scientist Francisco Carballo, curator Maria Lind, artists, writers, and researchers Magnus Bärtås, Edgar Shmitz, Snejanka Mihaylova, and Peter Tzanev, among others.
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 continue our introduction of the artists in “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination” with the Bulgarian artist Voin de Voin.
Voin de Voin (b. 1978, lives and works in Sofia) has appearances across various fields of visual art, ranging from performance to installation. His practice incorporates research into collective rituals and behavior, gender studies, ancestral knowledge, psychogeography, sociology, and parapsychology. He approaches art as a form of activism. His work has been presented in institutional and independent spaces, art fairs, performance venues, festivals, museums, public spaces, and natural sites around the world.
His new work for the exhibition, “How Do We Organize Ourselves in Times of Chaos?”, focuses on practical exercises for cultivating the skills necessary to regain orientation and the capacity to act under conditions of instability.
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.
e continue our introduction of the artists in “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination” with the Bulgarian artist Ivan Moudov.
Moudov (b.1979, Sofia) graduated from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia in 2002.
His artistic practice spans photography, video, performance, and installation. His works, often charged with strong metaphorical meaning, question the socio-political and economic conditions under which art is produced, as well as its relationship to systems of power. By subverting established norms and rules, Moudov reveals the mechanisms through which they operate.
For the exhibition, Moudov has created two new works, one of which is a new video work, “Brieftopka”, in which, with the help of a local speech therapist, the artist attempts to read the curatorial text “in the Gabrovo dialect.” The gesture reverses the usual practice of seeking to “correct” an accent and instead proposes a deliberate engagement with the local particularities of speech—even if only for the brief duration it takes for a curatorial text to be read.
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.
