ARCHIVE

Stefan Ivanov's project for the space of the Water Tower in Lozenets explores the new reality of images. The balance of the objects in strange vertical structures and panels builds the architecture of modern totems, composed of artificial and natural elements. Some of them are part of personal stories, and in the extended context of the compositions, they are combined with items taken directly from the artist's studio. The combination of clearly recognizable, collected from human life, items in enigmatic assemblages, discusses the classical notion of sculpture as placing certain values [...]

Sir Thomas More coined the term utopia in 1516 for his book "Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia", which literally translates as "A golden little Book, no less beneficial than entertaining of a republic’s best state and of the new island Utopia". The book describes an imaginary island society off the coast of South America. Utopia is derived from the Greek prefix "ou-" (οὐ), meaning "no", and topos (τόπος), "place" - so the name literally means "Nowhere".

In English Utopia is pronounced as Eutopia (in Greek Εὐτοπία) [...]

In 1950, Alan Turing developed the concept of the child machine, which was an idea of embryonic artificial intelligence. He imagined it as a simple system that used learning as a means of self-development. Turing believed that instead of creating a program that simulates the brain of an adult, a program could be created that simulates the brain of a child and then, when properly trained, we can obtain a brain of an adult. Modern intelligent systems interact with one another, share data, learn and improve - the origin of this digital communication is human, but the rationale behind which such [...]

One of the main lines of the Gonul Nuhoglu’s works is the ‘display’ of the missing body - part of her installations illustrate the paradox that the realization of reality can be stronger and more powerful not in putting the objects on display, but in marking their absence. ‘Empty’ clothes tell stories that allude to various aspects of human existence - from the futility of parlor protocols restricting the personality to certain frameworks imposed from outside to the rebellion and revolution constrained in the straitjackets of penalty regimes in human socium. Clothes can be both original [...]

The project of Stela Vasileva, Signs of Sound is a multimedia installation that functions in-line with the architectural environment where it is exhibited. The first part of the project was created for the concert Stone Hall in the Balchik Palace for the Music Campus Balchik event. The installation consists of nine mirror double-sided panels, bent in the form of various sound waves. Besides being a plastic object, when placed near the musicians, they capture and reflect the vibrations of their instruments, and the mirror panels materialize not only the sound but also the play of light in the [...]

Psychedelic states describe changes in human perceptions that cause synesthetic states. They are the result of activating connections between the different brain areas that are specialized in processing information from different senses. The term "psychedelic" derives from the ancient Greek words psuchē (ψυχή - psyche, "mind") and dēlōsē (δήλωση - "manifestation") and translates as "manifestation of the mind". In everyday life we perceive the signals coming from the senses separately, autonomously - we see colours, we hear sounds, and we feel touching. In the case of synesthetic states, this [...]

The most laconic description of the drawing as a process is to leave a trace with a tool selected by the artist on a material specified for the artistic intervention. The drawing is the shortest and quickest way to visualize ideas, and in this sense the spontaneous reaction leading to the appearance of lines on the drawing surface as well as the unintentional gesture are sealed directly into the final result. The American anthropologist, Ellen Dissanayake phrases art making as "the ability to shape and thereby exert some measure of control over the untidy material of everyday life". For [...]

A Theory of the present is a visual art project that presents art installations, video art, photo montages, photographs and digital art works, tackling the possibility of creating a universal temporal narrative spanning over the past, the present and the future. The works of Moira Ricci, Bill Viola, Kiril  Cholakov, Ergin Cavusoglu, Dan Tenev, Krassimir  Terziev, Bill Viola, Еrdal Inci, Valentin Stefanoff,  Berkay Tuncay and Nina Kovacheva  are displayed, where the idea of time is compacted to a degree of standstill, containing at the same time the energy of both movement and memory. It is in [...]

Мuhsin Bilge (1944-2014), a passionate lover and patron of art and friends with many famous Turkish artists, started his art collection in the early nineties . His notary office had become a legendary place in Istanbul. It was known as a small intellectual oasis within the world famous mega polis pulsating in its intense urban rhythm.  The visitors of Mr. Bilge’s notary office struggled to find their way to his work desk as they stumbled across all kinds of paintings, sculptures, drawings, books full of sketches, presenting certain ideas or some random drawings like those that artists usually [...]

Alchemy is the name of chemistry before its scientific period - in the Middle Ages it developed as a peculiar science, based on the idea of the possibility of transformation of base metals into gold and silver. To achieve this sacred goal, alchemists introduced the notion of Philosopher's Stone. By this concept they designated a universal substance that turns base metals into gold and silver, is able to cure any disease and even to ensure immortality. But true alchemists had used different symbols to describe processes of transformation within the person - in the psyche or soul, which also [...]

In the Dissection of Memories Project, Kiril Cholakov explores the complex relationship between personal memory as part of collective memory and historical time. Through texts and images in pencil, charcoal and ink drawings (2014), and later in large-format canvases (2017), he tells stories from different periods of his life that have emerged spontaneously and randomly, depending on how the creative imagination has interacted with the images of the past. If the memories in these series are to be dated historically, they are from the age of state socialism (1944-1989), and the usual [...]

Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize is granted through a competition initiated with the collaboration of the Painting and Sculpture Museum Association and Akbank Sanat, with the aim of contributing to the new developments in the field of contemporary art and providing support for young artists. Ten artworks selected from the applications evaluated by the jury will be presented in the exhibition between May 17th and July 30th 2016. The Contemporary Artists Exhibition that has been contributing to the development of contemporary art in Turkey for over 30 years has once again evaluated the [...]

The innumerable images of everyday life are those, which we take in automatically, name or make use of without analyzing them, as entities, which are beyond any doubt. Their characteristics in everyday speech are explicit and unambiguous for they are part of the personal history of every individual - this is the world, which gives us the reassurance that we belong to a community in which we share the same perceptions and the same words to describe them. They are part of the language of everyday communication, the means of exchanging information, which does not require special knowledge or [...]

The project Unlimited explores the potentiality of fifteen of the most active contemporary Bulgarian visual artists to set up such an autonomous field of artistic practice, in which the authors’ will to choose a conception presenting their vision of art creation would play a fundamental role. The parameters set at the beginning of the competition merely indicated to the artists the "physical" limits of the term Unlimited. The participants were challenged with the question "What kind of project would you make if unlimited space and resources were placed at your disposal for its realization?" [...]

A basic use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes refers to a process of inward mental concentration, which reveals new, unsuspected possibilities in our effort to comprehend the world through images lurking in our subconsciousness.

In the new project of Georgi Ruzhev, a well-known Bulgarian video and sound artist, the potentialities of the video as a media are exploited in a manner typical of his work - capturing the spectator’s senses in a sort of spectacular kaleidoscopic theatre where the alternation of images follows its own logic subject to the notion of modern man’s existence in a [...]

M-Tel Awards for Contemporary Bulgarian Art exhibition in Varna were installed at one of the oldest warehouses at the industrial port. Besides the complex preparatory work for readjusting the building’s interior involving a substantial part of the personnel and the technical facilities of the port, it proved necessary to ensure special access for the public to the exhibition area. The port is a customs zone where free movement is restricted, and this called for marking off with containers a special passage for the spectators. The exhibition became the cultural event of 2009 most widely [...]

In 2008 M-Tel Awards for Contemporary Bulgarian Art started visiting Bulgarian towns, which had some experience in holding exhibitions of contemporary Bulgarian art. The first exhibition outside Sofia was staged in Plovdiv, part of the works being shown in the rooms of the Ancient Public Baths (exhibition space of "Art Today Association", while the others were exhibited in one of the tobacco warehouses emblematic of the city. In accordance with the principle of exhibiting in independent spaces, warehouses in Plovdiv were for the first time transformed into exhibition rooms by installing [...]

In 2007, the exhibition accompanying the M-Tel Awards for Contemporary Bulgarian Art competition was mounted at the National Palace of Culture (NPC), the largest conference and exhibitions center from the totalitarian period. The rubric "About NPC" in the site of the complex organizational structure governing the compound begins with the following lines: "The National Palace of Culture is a multifunctional complex, a contemporary castle - synthesis of modern architecture and the plastic arts. The magnificent spaces are animated by more than a hundred works of monumental painting, sculpture [...]

The first presentation of the Awards for Contemporary Bulgarian Art project outside of Bulgaria took place at the Künstlerhaus building in Vienna. The exhibition edifice built in 1868 after the design of architect August Weber is one of the architectural landmarks of the Austrian capital. It was created on the initiative of one of the oldest artists’ societies in Austria. Ever since its inauguration it has been functioning as an exhibition center, and in 1947 it was included in the program of the Vienna film festival. Since 1983, the organization in charge of the exhibition premises (Austrian [...]

The venues chosen for holding the competition M-Tel Awards for Contemporary Bulgarian Art were selected with a view to following the natural chronology of the participation by Bulgarian artists in events emblematic of the most recent cultural history of Bulgaria and at the same time in places uncommitted to specific museum or gallery policies. The curator's idea was to include visual artists of all generations actively working at the moment of opening the competition, artists whose names are associated with high-grade manifestations on the local art scene as well as abroad. The selection was [...]