Svetozara Aleksandrova, Rada Boukova, Albena Baeva, Iskra Blagoeva, Ani Vaseva, Stela Vasileva, Borjana Ventzislavova, Vitto Valentinov, Leda Vaneva, Voin de Voin, Vasilena Gankovska, Stanimir Genov, Zoran Georgiev, Ivo Dimchev, Stoyan Dechev, Leda Ekimova, Yasen Zgurovski, Stefan Ivanov, Vikenti Komitski, Daniela Kostova, Lazar Lyutakov, Lubri, Miná Minov, Mihail Novakov, Bora Petkova, Svetlana Mircheva, Martin Penev, Boris Pramatarov, Kamen Stoyanov, Simeon Simeonov, Dimitar Solakov, Radostin Sedevchev, Anton Terziev, Kalina Terzieva, Anton Tsanev.

In December 2003, the Meeting Point Program for young artists and curators began at the Sofia City Art Gallery. For the first time in the recent history of our country, a museum institution brought to the focus of attention artists who were starting their careers, and provided them with a chance to show their works and projects. The purpose of the program was to “introduce” them to the museum and secure a professional environment to help them develop practical skills for presenting and communicating their art.

In 2007, the Meeting Point Program evolved into a platform for contemporary art and young artists and became part of the exhibition program of the Vaska Emanouilova Gallery – the newly- opened branch of the Sofia City Art Gallery in Zaimov Park. Along with that, a program for contemporary sculpture was developed, which presented current and experimental approaches to the art of sculpture alongside the exhibition of works by Vaska Emanouilova contained in the collection of the gallery. Through the period of ten years until 2017, the two programs for contemporary art presented more than 60 artists, and over 120 artists participated in the various projects and initiatives implemented by the gallery. We can therefore talk about a generation/generations of artists who, through their work, alter the cultural situation in the country and contribute to the development of art history in Bulgaria.

Over the years, the programs have established different forms of cooperation with other organizations, institutions and art spaces. The most sustainable partnership between 2013 and 2015 was with Société Générale Expressbank, when for the first time in Bulgaria a bank bought works of art for the collection of a museum institution, the Sofia City Art Gallery. The contemporary art collection of the gallery was enhanced by more than 23 art works.

The curator’s project Shifting Layers. Young Art at the Museum originates from the understanding that this is an incomplete, fragmented generation of artists in the newest history of art and in the memory of the museum institution itself. It is a generation that emerged in the times of the “friendship diaries” and keeps going in the era of Facebook and social networks. Unlike the monolithic generation of the 1980s, united by its aesthetic culture and practices in the organized institutional artistic life, and unlike the generation of the 1990s that made the transition, in form and of values, to contemporary art and the West, the “young art” in the exhibition shows the versatile interests and working methods of artists residing in different parts of the world, travelling, and ever changing their horizons.

The exhibition concerns the themes of personal revolutions, new images and mythologies, of the artists’ attitudes toward and work with images in the internet era, of the boundaries between reality and imagination, of the documents and the different view of the city as a global space of forms, policies and routes of all kinds of people and narratives. It shows works dealing with the issues of memory and the present-day role and significance of the museum institution itself. The exhibition features works by 35 artists. It will be accompanied by a catalogue presenting these and another 33 artists and an overview of the development of the programs through the years. A large number of the displayed works of art constitute part of the contemporary art and photography collection of the Sofia City Art Gallery.

The project is realized with the support of the PROTOTYPE Platform of Société Générale Expressbank supporting projects on innovations, design thinking, culture and art, and of the Culture Program of Sofia Municipality.

Curator: Vladiya Mihaylova