From Ideology to Economy. Contemporary Bulgarian Art 20 years later, October 9th – 25th, 2009, The State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, Moscow, 21 Tverskaya Street, Curators: Iara Boubnova and Maria Vassileva
copyright:
the authors
colaborators:
ICA-Sofia, Форум Болгария - Россия, Государственный музейно-выставочный центр РОСИЗО
20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall have already gone by... When we are talking about Eastern Europe we are referring to this period as a period of “transition” – from socialism to capitalism, from totalitarianism to democracy, from the centralized Union of Artists to the art market. During this period Bulgaria, once nominated the “sunniest barrack of the Soviet Bloc”, became a member state of NATO and the European Union.
However, we should not mislead anybody – each country that has transited from the Soviet type of socialism to neo-capitalism is not such a bad place to live in – at least we do not need visa to travel to almost the entire world (except for Russia...). But we should not forget either that to get where we are now we needed 20 years of mistakes (selecting consistently bad leaders) and achievements (we managed not to get involved in the Balkan wars of the 1990ies); we suffered a 10 % brain drain to the West; we were subjected to the closest scrutiny under the EU microscopes in order to get into the union; we balanced quite decently in-between the great regional powers (Russia, Turkey, the unified Europe); we got to the point of being able to recognize our minorities and to even have no censorship whatsoever.
Vector. ICA-Sofia: Motives, Analyses, Critique is a project by the Institute of Contemporary Art - Sofia. The project is realised with the financial support of the National Fund Culture, Critique Programme
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