Echoes of Radiance

Author: Marta Djourina with participation of Sonya Yoncheva
Curator: Boris Kostadinov

If “foreigners are everywhere” (which is the theme of the biennale), then ECHOES OF RADIANCE proceeds from the hypothesis that we are all foreigners - regardless of our voluntary or involuntary participation in one or another social, cultural, economic, technological, political or migration context. Indeed, even if we have never crossed the threshold of our home, our technological modernity makes us foreigners every single second, sending us to virtual “foreign territories” and bringing us into contact with artificial intelligence.

Project [pdf]

Mausoleum for a Living World

Author: Iglika Christova
Curator: Marie-Laure Desjardins

The project "Mausoleum for a Living World" is conceived as an open-ended process exploring the historical and cultural transformations in Bulgaria in their direct relation to the universal History. It is a deliberately glocal scrutiny and the choice of Lenin's figure to be at the centre of the project is an expression of the intention to explore the historic recurrence embodied in one of its most devastating myths: the desire for power.

Project [pdf]
Visuals [pdf]

Pavilion for Psychic Concepts in Exile

Authors: Stanislav Pamukchiev and Peter Tzanev
Curator: Yovo Panchev

The idea of the project emphasizes the theme of the biennale "Foreign- ers Everywhere" and curator Adriano Pedrosa's concept related to the figure of the artist as a foreigner, exilee and refugee, questioning the work of art as a place of multiple crises reflecting the perils and pitfalls of language, the translation, the inconsistencies and differences between us.

Project [pdf]

Far Away and Next to Us

Author: Mariana Vassileva
Curator: David Elliott

Having moved far away from my homeland, I am always motivated to create the best possible embodiment of this theme - being a stranger in the world, in a particular geographical, economic or other, cultural value system or even in one's own family. .. Or simply because you are strangers to yourself.

Project [pdf]

Bulgaria as a Noun

Author / Curator: Radostin Sedevchev

The project is exploring the “conflicting attitudes towards the construction of identity (to be affirmed or broken down)”.

Project [pdf]

SIS project

Artists: Iskra Blagoeva and Boryana Petkova
Curator: Snejana Krasteva

SIS is an ongoing project by artists Boryana Petkova and Iskra Blagoeva in collaboration with an evergrowing number of women. Initiated by the two artists in 2021, it grew out of a common idea in devoting time and effort in the attempt to build a new, however temporary, form of sisterhood that would connect women across generations. 

Project [pdf]

Romantic Species

Artist: Aleksandra Chaushova
Curator: Dessislava Dimova

Romantic Species is a meditation on the subject of identity, otherness and exoticism, which extends not only to human destiny, but also to the history of assimilation of the foreign and the different in the natural world. Birds from distant lands have been known and sought after since Antiquity, and geographic explorations, trade and colonialism have increased access and interest in the study of exotic species of flora and fauna.

Project [pdf]
Visuals [pdf]

Three migrants in a boat

Artist: Petko Durmana
Curator: Giuseppe Lepore

The performance installation was created as an imaginary journey of three migrants and a Smuggler in a small rubber boat up the river Maritsa (Euros in Greek). The trip takes place at night, because the river is a border between Greece and Turkey, and the passengers must hide from the border police of both countries during the day. Their goal is to reach Bulgaria and from there continue to their dream life in rich European countries. The river Maritsa is a very dangerous part of one of the main migrant routes to Europe and there, according to statistics, is the largest number of missing unidentified migrants in Greece.

Project [pdf]
Visuals [pdf]

Arid

Artist: Dimitar Solakov
Curator: Lars Nordby

As there are foreigners everywhere, imagine a world where there are foreigners nowhere.

The exhibition proposal, titled Arid by Dimitar Solakov, reflects the topic of the 60th Venice Biennale from its endpoint. Solakov’s exhibition project takes an expressionistic approach, inviting viewers to a visual and auditory experience that confronts human negligence against the backdrop of potential planetary destruction. 

Project [pdf]

Foreigners nowhere

Author: Borjana Ventzislavova
Curator: Galina Dimitrova-Dimova

The project offers healing practices. Healing of the fear and hatred that give birth to racism, xenophobia and aggression, and that lead to the crises and conflicts we face today. The healing process emphasizes empathy and mutual aid and involves the application of artistic and magical rituals and the use of their respective tools. These rituals are usually associated with tradition and superstition, which are the guardians of the patriarchal spirit and culture of the community. Superstition is even more concerned with guarding against the alien, the unfamiliar, and the different, which is what this project deals with. The artist’s tactic is to apply similar means, breaking down the patriarchal to achieve the absolute opposite of this, namely understanding, care and tolerance of the other, the different.

Project [pdf]

Getting off High Horses

Author: Luchezar Boyadjiev
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza

We live in the times of polarization where many monuments are falling and others are protected by pillows at the time of war. “Everyone can be a statue, but for this your life needs to matter” wrote philosopher Paul B. Preciado in response to the iconoclastic gestures on colonizer figures all over Europe and the UK since 2020. Whose life really matters or whose life matters more than the others, are the major questions that have defined the global political agenda especially in the last two decades. Those dilemmas are reflected upon by Luchezar Boyadjiev’s extensive proposal for the Bulgarian pavilion at the 60th International Biennale of Art in Venice curated by Adriano Pedrosa for 2024.

Project [pdf]
Visuals [pdf]

Where do you go when you close your eyes

Artist: Kalin Serapionov
Curator: Marina Slavova

In Where Do You Go When You Close Your Eyes? Kalin Serapionov explores the theme of communication, the boundaries between the personal and the shared, but this time the individuality of the characters is presented through their personal belongings. 33 strangers of different genders, ages, backgrounds and social contexts will participate in the filming of the video. Each of them will be provided with a mirrored surface container, the size of a traveling suitcase – a familiar capacity that has become part of our nomadic everyday life. In these containers, each participant will bring their most important possessions, defining their character, essence and interests, but also telling their personal motive and idea of travel.

Project [pdf]

Dreaming Against the Drift

Author: Kalas Liebfried (Kaloyan Lyubomirov)

The project explores extinction and disappearance - both in the context of nature and the global ecological crisis, and in terms of memory and history. The proposal offers a poetic journey against the flow of the Danube, intertwining personal narrative, the indefinable solitude of the stranger, and the grand narrative of man in the Anthropocene. The Danube stands as a potent symbol of both a border and a link, deeply embedded in European culture and history. For Liebfried, the river is connected to the estranged home and the attempt to return.

Project [pdf]
Visuals [pdf]

Origin – Earth

Author: Lora Dimova
Curator: Christine Langinauer

nI her work artist Lora Dimova addresses our sense of belonging on a deep and profound level. A longing beyond a specific nation and not defined by borders. Dimova's new body of work Origin - Earth excavates our connection to land and nature. tI brings together the practices she has de- veloped over the years ni terms of ceramic technique, philosophical thinking and artistic language. Stretched between East and West, North and South, past and future, tradition and modernity, the artist often wonders where she belongs.

Project [pdf]

Anthropophagus

Author: Yona Tukuser

The current project “Anthropophagus” aims to unite the tragic events of the past with the current war caused by the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. Yona Tukuser's highly expressive, multi-layered paintings have a shocking impact, turning man-eating stories into dramatic requiems. The installation is the link between the famine, when grain was requisitioned on the orders of Soviet governments, and the current war, in which grain is scorched by Russian missile and drone attacks. Through interviews conducted by Yona in Bulgarian villages in Ukraine in 2018, the film reveals harrowing recollections of people who witnessed the effects of the brutal famine, recounting one of its sinister end phases – anthropophagy (cannibalism).

Project [pdf]

Aeolian Echos

Artists:

• Alexandar Hadjiev
• Boris Dalchev
• Ksenia Ravvina
• Mihaela Dobreva

Curators: Rosena Ivanova, Gabriela Vassileva

The work positions itself within the discourse of foreignness, displacement, and the exploration of marginalized narratives, contributing to the ongoing dialogue within international contemporary art.

Project [pdf]
Visuals [pdf]

The Neighbours

Artists: Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian, Liliya Topouzova
Curator: Vasil Vladimirov

The Neighbours excavates the silenced and fading memories of survivors of communist political violence, shedding light on repressions that unfolded between 1945 and 1989, and explores its troubling legacy into the present. Krasimira Butseva, Julian Chehirian, and Lilia Topouzova employ modified objects, video, and sound design to tell the stories of those who endured Bulgarian Gulag camps and prisons. The project is of immense importance, blending artistic research, oral histories, fieldwork, ethnography and technology. In creating a space in which to bear witness to those marked as foreigners within Bulgaria’s borders in the past, it takes seriously Adriano Pedrosa’s call to examine “Foreigners Everywhere”.

Project [pdf]
Visuals [pdf]