NINE TAKES ON VENICE: THE BULGARIAN PAVILION, THE BIENNALE, AND AN IMAGINARY GOLDEN LION

On the occasion of the 61st Venice Biennale and the Bulgarian Pavilion “The Federation of Minor Practices”, featuring the artists Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, and Rayna Teneva, as well as curator Martina Yordanova, we invited eight curators and artists to respond to three brief questions: (1) to share their impressions of the Bulgarian Pavilion, (2) to comment on the broader context of the Biennale, and (3) to indicate which national pavilion they believe would deserve the Golden Lion, which was not awarded due to the resignation of the international jury.

The responses outline a range of perspectives—from critical reflections on curatorial approaches and institutional frameworks to personal impressions of individual works and national participations. We publish them with the aim of contributing to the ongoing debate on one of the most important events in contemporary art today.

Participants: Michaela Lakova, Iara Boubnova, Ralitsa Gerasimova, Boris Kostadinov, Lilia Topouzova, Galina Dekova, Michail Michailov, Milena Edvig, and Viktoria Draganova.

The Federation of Minor Practices, Bulgarian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, 2026. Images: Rayna Teneva and Journal for Social Vision.

Michaela Lakova, artist

(1) The Bulgarian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale is impressive in terms of its concept, design (spatial solution), and the selection of artists and works. It presents a range of video pieces, some of which I had seen in previous exhibitions, while others were shown for the first time. Geography Is Destiny by Rayna Teneva is a personal, lyrical, and deeply human film, shot in Kazanlak, the artist’s hometown, that draws you into every moment and invites profound empathy. Maria Nalbantova presents the poetic short film Marsh Song, searching for voices across the vast Dragoman Marsh, a landscape she has been exploring for years. In Spray and Play, Veneta Androva investigates misinformation and parasitic automated websites that manipulate public opinion. Gery Georgieva contributed a powerful performance at the opening of the Bulgarian Pavilion, skillfully combining text, movement/dance, and dialogue with the audience, alongside her video work. Through the performance, she directs attention to the female body and the myth surrounding it—a theme that is not only present in her video, but also to some extent sets the tone of the entire pavilion.

(2) Compared to previous editions, this year’s Venice Biennale will undoubtedly leave a mark through its political engagement, above all because it addresses urgent issues such as the role of art in times of war, a complex geopolitical climate, and a technologically transforming world.

Personally, I joined the march/protest under the slogan No Artwashing Genocide, which took place on May 8 against Israel’s participation in the Biennale. Twenty-seven national pavilions were closed in protest, and Biennale cultural workers also announced a strike in solidarity. Some participants in the main exhibition at the Arsenale removed their works, while others altered them by adding Palestinian flags and expressing solidarity with Palestine. The word “genocide” is effectively forbidden in the art world when it comes to Israel and Palestine, and that is deeply problematic.

Beyond this, I was particularly moved by Helter Skelter, the exhibition by Arthur Jafa and Richard Pearse at the Prada Foundation, especially by the way the artists’ works communicate with one another, creating dialogue and opening a space for reflection and contemplation. I was also deeply impressed by Of Woman Born, the exhibition of Indian artist Nalini Malani at Magazzino del Sale, where she presents a nine-channel video installation combining sounds, texts, and images of women, myths, and global conflicts. I also recommend the conversation with Koyo Kouoh from her most recent exhibition at BOZAR in Brussels.

(3) For me, this award has largely lost its meaning when viewed through the political lens and paradigm of the times we live in. It is important to note that the jury responsible for awarding prizes at this year’s Venice Biennale was forced to resign collectively after announcing that it would not include Israel and Russia in the deliberations for the Golden Lion for National Participation.

Closed national pavilion in the Giardini during a solidarity strike supporting protests against the inclusion of Israel at the opening of the 61st Venice Biennale 2026. Photo: Journal for Social Vision.

Iara Boubnova, curator

(1) It is difficult for me to take an objective view of the Bulgarian Pavilion in Venice because I am still not convinced of the sustainability and consistency of Bulgaria’s participation. Since the beginning of my efforts for a national representation—starting with a letter to President Zhelev in 1995—Bulgaria has participated only eight times. The Federation of Minor Practices is a major curatorial success. The curator has brought together several different artists through the language of video, spatial composition, and a computer game. I have little experience with such games and was unable to navigate this one successfully, but I am well acquainted with Schiller’s famous aphorism that “Man is only fully human when he plays,” as well as Huizinga’s concept of Homo Ludens, according to which play is a driving force of culture.

I believe that play also generates a culture of curiosity, which may explain why the practices of these four contemporary international artists are important today, even if they are considered “minor.”

(2) It seems that the 61st Venice Biennale is one of the most problematic editions in the history of this vast exhibition. Curator Koyo Kouoh, who heard our times “in a minor key,” passed away prematurely, and her team was forced to assemble the project without her “master plan.” Yet the Biennale will remain in history above all because of the protests—both against the participation of Israel and Russia and because of the institution’s evident inability to respond to the United States.

The dissatisfaction of countries with smaller GDPs and weaker local art markets toward the powerful gallery support enjoyed by certain artists was palpable. The collateral events were generally better conceived and easier to navigate. I also see a problem in the presentation of time-based art—serious works struggle to find a place within the competitive Biennale format, while attractions and selfie spots tend to dominate.

The jury’s apparent inability to meaningfully “evaluate” the participations was disappointing. There are magnificent works in the curatorial exhibition, but I was unable to understand how the whole was meant to be experienced “in a minor key.”

The increasingly acute issue of the Biennale’s simultaneously national and supranational structure has been debated since the 1960s. I hope we will witness change.

(3) I would have liked the award to go to the Spanish Pavilion for Los restos by Oriol Vilanova. Respecting the architecture of the building and the fundamental laws of visual perception, he has created an immense document on the place of art today, reduced to reproduction and the insignificant souvenir. Through humor, the work absorbs the eternal and the new, the global and the local, the revolutionary and the traditional, the fine and the applied, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the monumental and the miniature.

Los Restos, Spanish Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, 2026. Photos by Marco Zorzanello and Jacopo Salvi. Courtesy: Biennale di Venezia.

Ralitsa Gerasimova, curator

(1) This year, the Bulgarian Pavilion fit perfectly into the dominant tendency among national pavilions—video and digital art complemented by exhibition design solutions.

Overall, my assessment is positive, despite inevitable comparisons. Individually, the works are excellent. Rayna Teneva’s film deserves a pavilion of its own, given its duration, depth, and years of development. Veneta Androva’s video is astonishing, both in content and artistic expression. Maria Nalbantova has made the best possible use of her long engagement with the Dragoman Marsh and her current position of distance from it. Gery Georgieva remains faithful to her exploration of the female image and her challenge to myth as stereotype.

The sense of unity relies heavily on the elegant exhibition design, despite its conceptual imposition. Four significant works, different in tone, subject matter, and duration, are brought together—but by what exactly? That question remained open for me. It seems that the strongest element of cohesion exists on a purely human level among the participants themselves, though this remains behind the curtain.

(2) In Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition In Minor Keys, I discovered a very different subtext. First, I found nothing “minor” in the works presented. Second, I noticed the predominance of artists positioned outside Western civilization. The “minor” became the “minoritarian,” and this completely reframed the experience for me.

My interpretation was confirmed in countless ways: beginning with the first Black woman curator of the prestigious Biennale; continuing with the unexpected empowerment of stage workers, performance artists, and backstage participants through protest; and extending to radical feminism (the Austrian and Danish Pavilions), gay parenthood (the Japanese Pavilion), diverse sexualities (the Swiss Pavilion), and more.

Thus, the minor tones resonated for me as an homage to the resilience and poetics of the insignificant, the unheard, and the subordinated—a voice lacking the authority of power but rich in humanity. While Kouoh’s concept was criticized for excessive passivity in a conflict-ridden world, I believe that amplifying unheard voices is itself a genuine act of resistance against a disintegrating materialist society.

(3) The unquestionable highlight was the Austrian Pavilion. On a more personal level, I was captivated by the song of the sirens in the Polish Pavilion, while Pavel Braila’s project for Moldova deeply moved me through its intertwining of fairy-tale fantasies with the horrors of contemporary war.

Liquid Tongues installation view, Polish Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, 2026. Photo by Jacopo Salvi (altomare)/ Zacheta Archive.

Boris Kostadinov, curator and director of Scope BLN, Berlin

(1) I did not manage to watch the films in the Bulgarian Pavilion in their entirety and will return to them later, but my first impression is very positive. It is a well-structured pavilion with a precise spatial choreography. The curatorial work is evident in the achievement of an atmospheric unity and in the control of the rhythm through which audiences perceive both the individual works and the pavilion as a whole.

The project functions as an integrated installation context in which the individual works operate within a shared spatial, material, and architectural narrative. There is a balance between accessibility to an international audience and the preservation of local specificity. This is a mature presentation of Bulgaria. Congratulations to the artists, the curator, and the commissioner.

(2) This year’s edition is remarkable in many respects. It was marked by the death of artistic director Koyo Kouoh and later by unprecedented tensions surrounding the award system, including the jury’s withdrawal from the prize-giving process. Added to this were the large-scale protests in Venice and the symbolic blockades of pavilions in the context of the Israel–Palestine war, transforming the exhibition into a field of events rather than merely a field of perception.

The curatorial framework, privileging peripheral voices, rituality, spiritual gestures, and postcolonial themes, creates a powerful but, at times, overly dominant emphasis on handcrafted practices involving textiles, ceramics, metalwork, and other artisanal forms. On the one hand, this distinguishes the Biennale from previous editions; on the other, it often appears overly homogeneous, imposing a specific set of practices and aesthetics.

(3) I would divide the distinction among three parallel models of artistic validity:

The German Pavilion—for the remarkable work of the late Henrike Naumann. Her art consistently combined an intellectual engagement with historical trauma and a distinctive personal artistic language. The Austrian Pavilion—for the exceptional radicalism of Florentina Holzinger, whose post-apocalyptic performances are executed with undeniable force. The Italian Pavilion—for a different kind of courage demonstrated by Chiara Camoni. Rejecting artificial representationality, she created a collective ritualized environment that functions as a unified, living, and fairy-tale-like forest of monumental ceramic figures.

1., 2. German Pavilion, Henrike Naumann, The Home Front, 2026. Photo Jens Zieh Berlin. 3, 4. Italian Pavilion, Chiara Camoni, Con te con tutto (With you, with everything), 2026. Photos: Jacopo Salvi and Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: Biennale di Venezia.

Lilia Topouzova, researcher, representing the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale

(1)  The Bulgarian Pavilion, The Federation of Minor Practices, is a powerful and intelligent take on the possibility of the collective as both practice and political orientation. The four artists, Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, and Rayna Teneva, each bring subtlety and conceptual precision to the project, and Martina Yordanova’s curation holds them together with confidence and restraint. What I appreciated most was that the pavilion does not try to monumentalize Bulgaria or perform national identity in an obvious way. Instead, it proposes specific minor practices, care, attention, ecological awareness, and digital skepticism,  as forms of embodied knowledge and serious political imagination. In that sense, without merely illustrating the theme, it enters a meaningful dialogue with Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys’ and its call for relation and repair.

(2)  For me, the Arsenale section of the curated exhibition was the strongest and most absorbing part of the 2026 Biennale. It felt like a posthumous curatorial testament: an attempt to preserve Kouoh’s ethics of listening and sensory attention in a world where political violence keeps forcing itself back into the exhibition’s frame. I was struck by how powerfully video functioned throughout as a fully realized art form capable of holding time, voice, image, and atmosphere together. The words of poets and philosophers were woven throughout not as commentary, but as forms of witnessing. To listen, meander, and dream becomes here an artistic practice: one that refuses to look away from historical horror or present atrocity, while still imagining repair and collective life otherwise.

(3) If it were up to me, I would respect and uphold the international jury's decision to resign.

1. Alice Maher, photo by Marco Zorzanello 2. Ramos Lind, photo by Marco Zorzanello, 3. Dan Lie, photo by Luca Zambelli 4. Akinbode Akinbiyi, photo by Luca Zambelli, 5. Photo by Jacopo Salvi. 2026. Courtesy: Biennale di Venezia.

Galina Dekova, Director of the City Art Museum in the Palace of Culture, Pernik

(1) The presentation stands out for its high professional standard, particularly in its technical and design solutions and in the successful integration of digital content into the spatial environment. The exhibition encourages interactive participation and creates the desired atmosphere characteristic of an alternative or fictional institutional setting and model of representation. Conceptually, the project functions as an appropriate complement to the broader framework of the Biennale, although its somewhat literal adherence to the given theme limits the possibilities for a more independent interpretive position. Gery Georgieva’s performance at the opening did not fully meet my expectations, as it reproduced a specific and already established understanding of contemporary art rather than articulating current social, political, or cultural concerns in a convincing manner.

(2)For me, the 61st Venice Biennale is marked by a duality: on the one hand, a sense of institutional transformation and a highly politicized international environment; on the other, completely apolitical and abstract projects. The central exhibition emphasizes intimate, fragmented, and peripheral artistic voices, drawing attention to vulnerability, memory, and cultural resilience. At the same time, the national pavilions reveal a desire to rethink the very model of national representation through themes of migration, identity, ecology, and geopolitical conflict. The tensions surrounding the participation of particular countries transformed the Biennale not only into an artistic space but also into a clearly political one, with especially strong positions coming from countries that have traditionally existed outside the center, such as Moldova, Belarus, and others.

(3)I believe the Austrian Pavilion stands out decisively above all others, and the selection of Florentina Holzinger is a clear statement of first place.

1. Opening Étude, SEAWORLD VENICE 2026 © Helena Manhartsberger. 2,3,4. Seaworld Venice, Austrian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Photo: Andrea  Avezzù. Courtesy: Biennale di Venezia. 

Michail Michailov artist, representing the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

(1) The Bulgarian Pavilion fits very well within this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale. The curatorial work of Martina Yordanova and the overall presentation are exceptionally professional and meet the standards such a project requires. Although the current political situation in Bulgaria is not particularly favorable, it was unfortunate that no more influential or representative figure from our country attended the opening to emphasize the significance of the pavilion in the way it deserves.

The works engaged me both intellectually and emotionally, and I believe that each of them could have fit just as well thematically within one of the Biennale’s main exhibitions. The fictional research institute addresses important issues such as disinformation, labor, and environmental care.

I hope visitors will dedicate sufficient time to the Bulgarian Pavilion, given the abundance of artistic positions presented throughout the Biennale. It would be wonderful if, thanks to what I consider a strong project, Bulgaria’s participation in the Venice Biennale could finally become firmly established in the years to come.

(2) The Biennale’s theme, In Minor Keys, is actually very intriguing. Unfortunately, I do not perceive a clear common thread in the curatorial approach. Visually and thematically, the works are too heterogeneous. Overall, the main exhibitions feel overcrowded, and only a few works truly resonated with me. Among them is Alfredo Jaar’s The End of the World. Among the national pavilions, my favorites are Austria and the Netherlands. Both pavilions use performance as their primary artistic medium. In today’s world of constant information flows and excessive stimulation, I believe live art has a far more powerful impact. Beyond the official Biennale exhibitions, I would also like to highlight CANICULA (Fondazione In Between Art Film), which left a deeper impression on me than the exhibition in the Arsenale.

(3) Without hesitation, I would award the Golden Lion to Florentina Holzinger, although for me an even more pared-down version of the pavilion would have been sufficient.

Alfredo Jaar, The End of the World, Installation view at 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys. Photo: Luca Zambelli Bais. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia.

Milena Edvig, gallerist

(1) The Federation of Minor Practices is a strong title because it already contains a clear position. The pavilion does not operate through grand symbols or ready-made identities, but through quieter, more vulnerable, and often invisible gestures. Rather than telling us what to think, it opens a space for different voices and practices to coexist without attempting to dominate one another.

It is also important to consider the context: the period between winning the competition and opening the pavilion was exceptionally short for a project involving an interactive platform, several video works, and a large-scale installation. The concept likely needed more time and a stronger environment in which to fully unfold its potential, yet it nevertheless held its ground.

For that reason, the achievement of Martina Yordanova, Dessislava Dimova, and the artists Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, and Rayna Teneva deserves recognition and respect.

(2) This year’s Venice Biennale left me with the impression of many different voices, without a single overarching narrative. The strongest pavilions, for me, were those that did not merely present good works but succeeded in creating entire worlds. I was especially drawn to the Japanese Pavilion for its delicacy, strangeness, and distinctive poetic quality. There was something light about it, yet profoundly memorable. The Austrian Pavilion represented the opposite pole: powerful, physical, theatrical—almost like a contemporary version of Hieronymus Bosch. I admired the way it conveyed chaos, grotesquery, absurdity, and human vulnerability through a thoroughly contemporary visual language.

(3)For me, the Japanese Pavilion was the strongest because it transforms care and vulnerability into an artistic experience that is at once tender, strange, humorous, and remarkably precise in its reflection of the world we live in.

Grass Babies, Moon Babies. Japan Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, 2026.

Photo: Luca Zambelli Bais. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia.

Viktoria Draganova, curator and editor-in-chief of the Journal for Social Vision

The pavilion presents four strong video and film works that examine identity through new technologies, the military-industrial complex, the ecological crisis, and the digital environment. Together, they outline the political and social context of Eastern Europe, where populism, disinformation, and various forms of propaganda have become symptoms of deeper structural processes. At the same time, the works seek possible lines of resistance—ancestral, ecological, intuitive, and collective.

Precisely because of the strength of the films, their sequential presentation in a single screening lasting nearly two hours sits uneasily with the rhythm through which most visitors experience the Biennale. I also find myself wondering whether the interactive game, intended to serve as an entry point to the works, together with the conceptual framework it introduces, does not pre-emptively and too strongly frame their reception, limiting their complexity and emotional impact.

(2) Venice is a place of grand gestures—blockbuster performances, spectacular films, and installations designed for immediate effect. The pavilions of Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Lithuania, and France offered a different tone. Rather than activism, they presented carefully constructed visual and conceptual narratives in which history, imagination, and the collective body become spaces through which rebellion can be recognized and understood.

(3)In the field of visual art, whitewashing is a systemic mechanism, which is why the jury’s decision and the reasons behind it deserve respect and support. My Golden Lion would go to the collective act of solidarity demonstrated by the jury, the artists, and the pavilions that supported them.

1. Comme Saturn, French Pavilion. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. 2. Merike Estna, The House of Leaking Sky, Estonian Pavilion. Courtesy: Estonian Pavilion. 3. Jakub Jansa, Silence of the Mole (film), Czechoslovak Pavilion. Photo: Shot by Us. Courtesy: Jakub Jansa. 4. Eglė Budvytytė, animism sings anarchy, three-channel film installation, 50 min. © Eglė Budvytytė, 2026. 5. Lithuanian Pavilion. Photo: Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia.