Starting with December 15th 2010 in the ICA-Sofia Gallery you can see and buy Museum Souvenirs from the none-existing museum for contemporary art.
According to the Larousse Encyclopedia the first meaning of the word “souvenir” is “a memory, a memento”. It also means a small object that is sold to tourists at the most visited places. The “mementoes” that the ICA-Sofia Gallery is offering to your attention are of this kind of places – the art museums seen in the way of the participating artists in spite of the fact that such museums do not actually exist in the local environment…
17 Bulgarian artists from various generations are showing their special “production” closely related to the individual artistic languages of the authors: Alexander Kiossev, Ivan Moudov, Kalin Serapionov, Kalina Terzieva, Kamen Stoyanov, Kiril Prashkov, Krassimir Terziev, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mariela Gemisheva, Nedko Solakov, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Samuil Stoyanov, Stefan Nikolaev, Stefania Batoeva, Veronika Tzekova, Vikenti Komitski, and Zoran Georgiev. Compact, attractive and affordable, these objects are art works that at the same time have the qualities of museum souvenirs meant to bring closer to the audience the aura of contemporary art.
With the exhibition “Museum Souvenirs” ICA-Sofia is keeping up the process of making contemporary art more popular in the country in a form, which is in line with the approaching holiday season. You are invited to a kind of a “shop”, which exists in every contemporary art museum around the world. The participants in the show are motivated by the famous title “Memories from the Future” – if the museum as we want it seems to be located somewhere in the coming future, then we are offering to you our living memory of it… The desire to bring closer this museum makes us aim to “enter” the homes of the people through the “street stall” – we want to offer those people who are our allies in art the possibility to take home a piece of the museum for contemporary art; we want to convince others that such a museum is not a storage of something long gone and untouchable but of something that is here with us although the actual building has not yet gone up in the middle of Sofia.