21 March 2026 – 30 June 2026
First International Laboratory for the 26th Gabrovo Biennial of Humour 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 Humour and Satire, Gabrovo
The Museum of Humour and Satire presents the project Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination – the first international laboratory in preparation for the upcoming 26th edition of the Gabrovo Biennial of Humour and Satire in Art (2029). The project features a group exhibition showcasing newly commissioned works, including performance, video, film, interactive installations, 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 together with Snejana Krasteva), 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 every fragment from the past can return 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, of insistence without illusion. “It is not about believing that things will work out, but about refusing to abandon the act of imagining the future, even after belief has been exhausted” (Noori). Art offers a space in which alternative models of co-existence can be tested on a smaller 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.
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, curatorial 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, artists, writers, and researchers Magnus Bärtås, Edgar Shmitz, and Snejanka Mihaylova, 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.
