Nataliya Yordanova, Rayna Teneva and the collective Valko Chobanov, Marina Genova and Tsvetomira Borisova are this year's fellows of the e-valuation 4.0 digital arts platform of the DA LAB Foundation. Their projects will be produced by the Foundation and shown to the public in Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and Veliko Tarnovo.
The finalists were selected by a jury composed of the three founders of DA LAB - prof. Venelin Shurelov, Dr. Galina Dimitrova-Dimova and Antoni Raizhekov. They will be curators of the upcoming exhibitions of the fellows and their mentors in the process of creating the works.
The three premiere solo exhibitions will take place simultaneously between 17 and 30 June in the three galleries located next to each other on Depoo, Harta and Arosita. In the other three cities, the projects will be presented later in the summer in Branch "Georgi Velchev" at the Art Gallery, Varna, Space for Contemporary Art TAM, Veliko Tarnovo and Gallery CU 29, Plovdiv.
This year the selection was an extremely difficult task due to the very strong proposals. Dimitar Solakov, Diana Bunkin, Gabi Grigorova and to look for options for collaboration with them.
e-valuation is a platform of DA LAB Foundation for the development and support of Bulgarian artists working in the field of digital arts. The mission of the platform is to produce works of Bulgarian artists and present them on the professional scene. The main goals are professional development of artists and promotion of contemporary forms of art created with digital media and technologies.
In June at the Goethe Institute "DA LAB" organized a seminar related to the mission of the e-valuation platform to support young Bulgarian artists. The aim of the training is to introduce Bulgarian artists to successful practices of collaboration with scholars and experts in creating interdisciplinary creative content, and also to connect them to the international scene. The seminar includes a series of lectures by Austrian curator and researcher Claudia Schnug, as well as curators Andrei Tudoz & Sibina Suru from Romania, founders of the Marginal organization.
In 2023, e-valuation 3.0 is produced by the trohi collective with their project New Gods / New Rituals, Jana Vassileva with "(In)Exhaustible Memories and Fabricated Truth and Other Myths of Human Annotation" by the Raw lab collective.
The activities of the e-valuation 4.0 platform are supported by the National Culture Fund under the Creation Programme.
Information about the artists:
Natalia Yordanova is an interdisciplinary visual artist working between Amsterdam and Sofia. Her education includes an MA from the Sandberg Institute in the Netherlands (2020), a BA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (2018), a BA in Photography from the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Bulgaria (2013) and an Erasmus at CSM in London (2017). Her work has been exhibited internationally in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Belgium, Germany, Egypt and the UK. She has participated in residencies in Brussels, Belgium, Zeitz and Munich, Germany and Cairo, Egypt.
Raina Teneva is a visual artist. She holds a Master's degree in Media Art from the University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany and a Bachelor's degree in Photography from the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia. In her work Raina offers media narratives that take installation, film or performative form. They are inspired by and stem from a research practice rooted in private and public archives, found photographic and film material. In times of post-truth, archival matter offers a territory for posing questions deeply related to memory, the (de)construction of identity and speculations directed towards the future. Her work is guided by process with the intention that it will increasingly take precedence over outcome. This necessitates the use of performative, auto-exploitative and social gestures.
Marina Genova, Tsvetomira Borisova and Valko Chobanov are visual artists working and living in Sofia. They have participated in solo and group exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad.