The Federation of Minor Practices

Artists: Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, Rayna Teneva, Veneta Androva 
Curator: Martina Yordanova

The Bulgarian Pavilion is conceived as the headquarters of a fictional research lab operating within a post sovereign, care oriented political imagination known as The Federation of Minor Practices. Positioned slightly ahead of the present, the Pavilion looks back at the early twenty first century as the moment when the conditions for this formation first became visible.

The near past of this formation is presented through four films. Gery Georgieva’s "UWU Channel Radiance" mobilises digital myth and prophecy to question regimes of identity, pleasure, and mediated truth. Veneta Androva’s "Spray and Pray" examines infrastructures of disinformation through the ecology of mushroom websites and algorithmic systems. Rayna Teneva’s "Geography Is Destiny" traces the entanglement of labour, care, and violence in the Rose Valley, where rose harvesting coexists with arms production. Maria Nalbantova’s ongoing work at the Dragoman Marsh unfolds as a long term practice of ecological care, combining artistic research, environmental maintenance, and the recording of local human and non human narratives.

The Pavilion itself occupies the present as a space of suspension. Conceived as an interactive environment based on a computer game, it gathers signals from the four films and activates them through play as a practice of collective orientation.

From the perspective of an imagined future, the Pavilion appears as an early laboratory of formation, where shared procedures of attention, care, and play began to assemble a post sovereign political imagination.

Gery Georgieva

Gery Georgieva (b 1986 Varna Bulgaria) is а multimedia artist who lives and works in London. Her  practice encompasses video, performance, music, installation and sculpture.  She repeatedly stages herself as a culturally migrational diva. Situated between the legacies of post-socialist memory and Western art discourse, her practice stages hybrid encounters where national and personal narratives are continuously translated. Taking inspiration from pop culture, showbiz, traditional folk heritage and mythology in her performative gestures and musical alter egos, Georgieva negotiates identity as a site of mimicry and transformation — a space where pop and folk traditions collide and synthesise new meanings. Through improvisation and self-staging, she examines how cultural identity is configured, interrogating media conventions, commercial gender roles and where they collide with ideas of nationhood.

Georgieva’s work has been most recently shown in the touring exhibition Evrovizion in Varna & Sofia and a public commission at Skanstull station Stockholm Metro. Earlier solo projects shows at Cubitt, London (GB, 2020); Sörmlands Museum, Nyköping and Swimming Pool Projects, Sofia. She has performed internationally including at Palais de Tokyo & Block universe and she has exhibited and internationally in London (GB), Paris (FR), Sofia (BG), among others. Her films have been broadcast on Channel 4 Uk and scbreend Georgieva was the recipient of the Frieze Film Commission (2015) and the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2017). She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, and completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools, London (GB).

Maria Nalbantova

Maria Nalbantova is a visual artist working across mixed media and various techniques, including sculpture, DIY biomaterials, video, and drawing. Central to her practice is storytelling, through which she enters into dialogue with specific places and engages with their historical, socio-political, and ecological dimensions. She explores the relationships between human society and its environment by constructing speculative realities in which collected oral histories, archival materials, and interdisciplinary research intertwine with imagination and contemporary mythologies. Her work focuses on notions of coexistence, care, and responsibility.

Among her participations are: Silk Road: Artists’ Rendezvous – International Artists’ Silk Road Field Residency (2025), China; viennacontemporary (2024) with Sarieva Gallery, Vienna, Austria; the Art Encounters Biennial (2023), Timișoara, Romania; Manifesta 14 (2022), Pristina, Kosovo, as part of the group exhibition “Self-Splaining (Triumph of Empathy)” by the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia and at the Center for Narrative Practices by invitation of OGMS Gallery; Residency Unlimited (2022), New York, as a recipient of the Baza Award (2020); as well as the International Summer Academy (2021), Salzburg, Austria.

In early 2023, she was selected for the WaterLANDS Artistic Engagement Residency, funded by the EU Horizon programme – a four-year project at Dragoman Marsh in Bulgaria, one of six wetland Action Sites. Her projects have been presented in Austria, Germany, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Romania, Kosovo, the United States, and China. Her works are included in the Contemporary Art Collection of the European Parliament, the China International Culture Association, the Sofia City Art Gallery, as well as various private collections.

Rayna Teneva

Rayna Teneva (b.1986, Kazanlak, Bulgaria) is an artist working between Sofia BG and Vienna AT.

Reflecting on memory as a site of tension and continious renegotiation between the personal and the political, Teneva creates works that unfold in cinematic, installation, or performative formats.

In her artistic practice, Rayna Teneva often engages with institutional, private or found archive material to explore and recontextualize questions related to regimes of identity, migration, and the intersection of the intimate and the geopolitical. Frequently rooted in the vulnerable and the overlooked, her projects open up a space for collective reflection within the speculative field between the documentary and the fictional.

Rayna Teneva graduated in Media Art from the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, Germany, and in Photography from the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts (NATFA) in Sofia, Bulgaria.

In 2025, she was awarded the Balkan Contemporary Art Prize, initiated by the Singer–Zahariev Foundation, within the framework of BUNA Contemporary Art Forum. Rayna has received scholarships from the Ursula Blickle Foundation (DokKa Film Festival 2024), the Bulgarian Fund for Women (2023), Zeitbild Lab, HfG Karlsruhe (2019–2022), and the Heinrich Hertz Society (2018).
 

Veneta Androva

Veneta Androva (born in Sofia) is a visual artist living and working between Berlin and Sofia. Her practice centers on moving image and installation and is developed through research-based artistic approaches. Working across CGI-based moving image, multi-channel video, and spatial formats, she examines how contemporary realities are shaped by technological systems, mediated information, and structures of power. Across her projects, Androva develops hybrid narratives in which documentary material and fiction intersect. She works with archival traces, documentary sources, CGI, painting, and algorithmic processes, including machine-learning models. Through these layered structures, she investigates how knowledge is produced, circulated, and legitimized within technologically mediated environments, and how automated systems influence collective imaginaries and political agency.

Androva studied Fine Arts at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, as well as Philosophy and Art History at Humboldt University in Berlin, and completed a study period in moving image at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Her film AIVA received the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (2021) in the category Computer Animation, as well as the Golden Horseman for Animated Film and the LUCA Gender Diversity Award at Filmfest Dresden. Her earlier film From My Desert was nominated for the German Short Film Award (2020) and received the Critics’ Jury Award at the 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival.

Androva has been supported by programs and scholarships including the Elsa-Neumann Scholarship (NaFöG) by the Berlin Senate, Neustart Kultur / Stiftung Kunstfonds, Cusanuswerk, Mart Stam Scholarship, and the Bulgarian Fund for Women. Her work has been presented internationally at festivals and exhibitions including Ars Electronica, DOK Leipzig, EMAF – European Media Art Festival, Goethe Insitute, FILE São Paulo, and in institutional contexts across Europe and beyond.

Martina Yordanova

Martina Yordanova is currently curator at The National Gallery of Bulgaria, Founder and artistic director of IATRUS Residency Program in Veliko Tarnovo and founding member of Eastern Balkans Institute for Art and Architecture, ambassador and jury member of Sofia Art Fair. She grew up between Bulgaria and Austria, received her BA and MFA in Publicity, Communication sciences and Film-, Theater- and Media History from the University of Vienna in 2014. Yordanova’s curatorial practice is consistently cross-disciplinary. At the National Gallery of Bulgaria aimed at promoting the collection of the museum, developing partnerships with other art institutions, producing, and sharing knowledge around Bulgarian and international contemporary art, she is in charge of the curatorial department for contemporary art, onboarding and working closely with in- house and guest curators to develop educational and exhibition projects online and offline, commissioning artists for exclusive new artworks. Partnering with various organizations from the independent art scene in Bulgaria and the Balkans, her curatorial practice facilitates navigation between local and global art contexts. In 2023, she was a talks fellow at DAS (Dhaka Art Summit) in Bangladesh. In 2025, she participated in a curatorial residency program in Uzbekistan and was a guest curator at RAD ART Fair as part of RAD Curatorial.

Organisers

The Pavilion of the Republic of Bulgaria at the 61^st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is organized by the Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria. It is produced by the National Gallery, Sofia, with commissioner Dessislava Dimova.

http://mc.government.bg/index.php?l=2
https://nationalgallery.bg