Category: Projects

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.

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.

We continue our introduction of the artists in “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination” with the Bulgarian artist Nevena Ekimova.

Nevena Ekimova is a Bulgarian artist, based in her hometown of Gabrovo.

She studied contemporary art in Norway and Iceland, and got her BFA at the Valand Art Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Besides participating in exhibitions, she often works with public institutions and creates large-scale interactive projects for children and adults.

Nevena’s works are often both visual and tactile, have a poetic and/or performative element and invite active audience participation. 

In the interactive installation “Noise Threshold”, made for the exhibition in Gabrovo, 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.

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 “Brieftopia: Art Between Crisis and Imagination” with the Bulgarian artist Lexi Fleurs.

Lexi Fleurs is a contemporary artist working in film, painting, photography, and research-based work.

Her works are part of the collection of MAMCO Geneva and International House New York.

She holds an MFA from SVA NYC with a Fulbright scholarship and a BFA from HEAD Geneva.

Lexi Fleurs works as a freelance war documentalist and has been documenting the war in Ukraine since 2024.

In the exhibition, the new video work I Hate War and War Hates Me juxtaposes fragments of her visual communication with her friend 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.

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 Serbian artist Luka Cvetković.

Luka Cvetković is an artist working across video, performance, text, and publishing.

His practice challenges dominant subjectivities and power dynamics within and beyond art, engaging aesthetics, philosophy, and politics.

Cvetković has exhibited across Europe, received multiple awards, and was a special lecturer at UAL (2021).

Based in Belgrade, he co-runs the Identity Crisis Network , a research project connecting artistic practices and discourses that de-stabilize fixed notions of identity and subjectivity.

In his installation “Celebrations 2029” for the exhibition in Gabrovo, Luka Cvetković, “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.

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 Boryana Petkova.

Boryana Petkova (b. 1985, Sofia) is a visual and performance artist whose intense, emotionally charged practice draws on personal experience to explore the complexity of human existence.

Deeply autobiographical and embodied, her work confronts themes such as vulnerability, memory, and resilience.

Her works have been presented at Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art, Sofia; Drawing Lab, Paris; the International Museum of Modest Arts in Sète; Frac Picardie, Amiens; the Drawing Biennial in Rimini; and KAI10 Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, among others. She has performed at AWARE, Paris; the BUNA Forum, Varna; and Residency Unlimited, New York.

Humour is a key tool and form of resistance in the exhibition, alongside imagination.

Petkova’s installation and live performance “Smile!” affirm laughter as such an instrument, in which female laughter—brief, stifled, uncontrollable—is used as acoustic material to reveal the moral and social control exerted over the body.

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.