21.03.2026 – 30.06.2026
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.
More details about the project “Briftopia: Art Between Crises and Imagination”: https://humorhouse.bg/en/brieftopiaen/
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.
